


your dead best friend wants to get coffee

by boos



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Families of Choice, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Strangers to Lovers, Stupid Teenagers, jughead smokes weed and falls in love with bad boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2020-12-14 17:21:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 35,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21019445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boos/pseuds/boos
Summary: The last time Jughead and Archie ever talk is over the phone on the Friday before the 4th of July, and the last thing Jughead ever says to Archie is,That’s bullshit. This whole thing is bullshit. If you didn’t want to be friends anymore, Arch, that was all you had to tell me.He spits the sentence out angrily into his phone, hears the way Archie’s breath hitches, and then hangs up the call before Archie gets the chance to say anything at all.The next Monday, early in the morning, Dilton Doiley and his group of scouts spot Jason and Cheryl Blossom carrying a soaked body to the shore of Sweetwater, and when they rush down to help, they see the limp face of Archie Andrews, as pale as he’s ever been.(or: Archie dies on July 4th, 2016 instead of Jason Blossom.)





	your dead best friend wants to get coffee

**Author's Note:**

> WHO knows what this even is. wrote this and was like, ew, okay i guess, but i have to put it somewhere or i'll go insane
> 
> tw for: character death (obv), grief, dysfunctional drug use, and disordered eating (not really a main plot point, but it is in here)

In middle school, Archie always used to do this thing after they had just watched _ Stand By Me _for the first time in the basement of the Andrews’ house, both sitting on the smelly old couch down there and making big eyes at the T.V., both pretending that the movie hadn’t changed some part of them fundamentally.

Archie would do this thing when they were at lunch during school, sitting on the damp grass, where he’d look out at the treeline off in the distance and say, _ You know, Jug, we could go anywhere, be anyone we want. We could just go. _

Jughead thinks of it now and he wants to laugh at how dramatic it all seems – the two of them, barely twelve years old, with the same survival skills and life experience as infants, pretending like they could go on some predestined adventure – but he also remembers how important it had felt back then, how he had coveted Archie’s words in middle school and pressed them into his brain, over and over.

On weekends they’d walk the old railroad tracks that went along the outer edge of the forest and they’d sing songs they barely remembered the lyrics to and they’d say to each other, like it was some prayer or the last thing they had, _ We could go anywhere, be anyone we want. _When Jughead was with Archie it felt true, like Archie could really make it happen.

Jughead would dream about it, but the dreams were always different. Sometimes he and Archie would be in the woods in winter, building fireplaces and living in carved out tree trunks. Other days they were hitchhiking on trucks and trains endlessly, the background always stuck in summer, the grass super-green, the kind of blinding color that comes just after rain. In the dreams, nobody ever asked about Riverdale and Jughead and Archie never told anybody about who they were supposed to be. Sometimes they made up fake names and fake ages, whole lives that weren’t true, and nobody in the dreams ever blinked an eye or asked why.

Jughead would tell Archie about every single one the next day at school, always saying something like, _ I never wanted to wake up, _ or, _ Last night you called yourself Biff and I named myself Cal. _

Archie would laugh uproariously, pausing halfway through his turkey sandwich. _ Biff – like Biff from Back to the Future?_

_ Hey, your dream self chose it, not me. _

_ It’s _ _**your ** brain, dummy. _

And Jughead would squint up at the sky, tongue between his teeth, knowing the moment he’d look at Archie that he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from laughing.

And then he would look anyway, and it’d feel like the best laugh he’d ever had. 

The last time Jughead and Archie ever talk is over the phone on the Friday before the 4th of July, and the last thing he ever says to Archie is, _ That’s bullshit. This whole thing is bullshit. If you didn’t want to be friends anymore, Arch, that was all you had to tell me. _

He spits the sentence out angrily into his phone, hears the way Archie’s breath hitches, and then hangs up the call before Archie gets the chance to say anything at all.

The next Monday, early in the morning, Dilton Doiley and his group of scouts spot Jason and Cheryl Blossom carrying a soaked body to the shore of Sweetwater River, and when they rush down to help, they see the limp face of Archie Andrews, as pale as he’s ever been.

Summer melts and bends and warps in on itself. 

There’s a funeral, but Jughead barely remembers the important bits, only these random flashes of detail that kept him sane throughout the whole thing. How dark his shoes looked against the grass at the cemetery. The way that Mary and Fred stood next to him the whole time, like he was their second son. How Fred had cried so hard during his speech that Jughead had to look away. How Betty had come home from her internship early to stand stiffly in a black dress, her face tilted toward the ground during the whole service.

Mostly, he remembers sitting on a bench outside of the church after the funeral, sweating through his suit and crying childishly, failing to muffle the noise of his sobs in the fabric of his suit jacket. He had adamantly refused a ride home from Fred and made such a scene that Fred had just left him be on the bench.

Jughead hadn’t been able to sense just how much time had passed since the service had ended, but he knew that everybody else must have gone home by then. Which is why when he heard footsteps on the pavement, the kind that come from nice shoes with a good sole, he whipped his head up with wild alarm.

He was expecting it to be Fred come back to get him, or maybe even Betty, but instead he was greeted by red hair and a long face, and it took a moment before his brain pieced together that it was Jason Blossom staring down at him. Jason, who looked particularly soft in the summer light that had been filtered between the tree leaves, soft in a way that made him look like a person Jughead had never seen before, a stranger.

Jason’s lips said the words, "I’m sorry about what happened,"but Jughead couldn’t focus on any part of it, his head spinning with an odd sort of headache. Jason looked sad, sadder than he had any right to be. Jughead’s eyes had accidentally fixated on Jason’s hands which were limp at his sides, twitching occasionally, and all Jughead had been able to think about was those hands pulling Archie’s body out of a cold river.

He’d wanted to ask, _ Why was Archie there? _or _Why were you there? _but instead he had found himself saying, "It’s okay," his throat dry and his voice hoarse.

"His bag was there when I, uh, brought him to shore, and it had a bunch of stuff falling out of it. This was on the ground," Jason cleared his throat. "Thought you might want it."

Jughead plucked the thing from Jason’s grasp and turned it around to find a picture of himself. Betty had taken it on her Polaroid when the three of them were hanging out early in the summer, a day he’d forgotten about until just then. The Jughead of two months ago smiled shyly at the camera in the photo, part of his face blown out during the development of the film, but he looked happy. There was nothing special about it, the only thing written on the white strip at the bottom was “JUG” in Archie’s handwriting.

Jughead’s gut twisted and turned and twisted and turned and twisted and twisted and twisted, and all he thought while his eyes started to heat up and his mind turned to static was, _ I will not cry in front of Jason Blossom. I will not cry. _

"I kept it because… I don’t know – it seemed wrong to give it to the police," Jason had rocked back and forth onto his heels, "I’m, uh, I’ll be around… if you need anything." He’d stumbled through the sentence awkwardly, without all the elusive charm Jughead had known him to have. "Um, yeah. I’ll see you around." He added on after Jughead didn’t respond, and then cleared his throat and walked away, pushing his hands down into the pockets of his slacks.

Jughead had sat on the bench for a while longer, doubled over, looking as though he might upchuck at any second, and then he reached into his pocket for his phone. He barely looked as he dialed the number he knew by heart, the one he spent days memorizing as a little kid in case of emergency.

It rang and rang and rang like he’d known it would. Then –

_ Hi. Uh, hello! This is Archie Andrews. I can’t come to the phone right now, but leave me a message and I’ll – _

They do an autopsy on the body and can’t conclude anything beside the fact he drowned. Nobody knows why Archie Andrews would be at Sweetwater at six in the morning on July 4th, and so the investigation is pretty much wrapped up before it’s even started, shoved in a manila folder and put into a file cabinet to sit as a mystery until someone comes, years later, and thinks, _ Well, this doesn’t add up, _and solves it when it won’t even matter anymore.

Jughead tries to write a book about everything, about something – about Archie, mostly – but it all falls apart like loose string in his hands when he tries to put any of it together. He thinks of Archie calling him randomly that Friday and cancelling their road trip on a whim, his voice uncomfortable, like he’d just been playing along with Jughead the whole time they were planning it and had never actually wanted to go. But then Jughead remembers how excited Archie had been about it all once upon a time, excited enough that he’d gotten out his father’s old maps and they spent an hour marking their route through New York to one of the Great Lakes in sharpie.

He wonders for days and days and days what was at Sweetwater that would have been so important to Archie. More important than Jughead ever was. People speak in whispers around town, asking if it was suicide, and Jughead doesn’t even know how to process that idea, can’t even imagine an Archie that would – that would – do _that._

There are questions, so many questions, and everybody keeps looking at him like he has the answers, but he wants to say, _ Look, if I did, then I would be able to write this book, _ or, _ Look, if I did, then I would still have a best friend. _

He wonders about it for days and days and days, until something inside of him runs thin and dry, until numbness creeps around his body like a slow-spreading disease, reaching the root of his brain first.

Betty comes to him in those melted weeks before school starts and says, with her little ponytail swishing to the shake of her head, "We need to figure out what happened._"_

It’s not the first time they’ve talked since she came home, but it’s the first time it’s been just the two of them, nobody hanging over their shoulders to make sure they’re not about to agree on a suicide pact and go halfsies on a cup of cyanide.

Her eyes are bloodshot, like she hasn’t stopped crying the whole time she’s been home, and she raises her chin up defiantly, like she’s trying to prove something to him in this little booth at Pop’s with pleather seats that stick to their thighs.

Jughead has no patience for Perfect Girl Betty Cooper at the moment. "He drowned. That’s what happened." Jughead tells her, looking at his laptop in a childish stupor and typing gibberish out on his keyboard just to make it look like he’s actually writing something at all.

Betty inhales sharply. "Jughead," she says. Her eyes narrow at him. "If Archie meant anything to you at all –"

Jughead’s gaze snaps up from the screen. "Of course he meant something to me, Betty."

"Then why don’t you want to figure out what –"

"Because it’s useless!" Jughead says with a burst, looking up at her, his face twisted and sour.

What he really wants to say is: _ Because I tried already, I tried, _ and he thinks of how he went to the police station the morning after, how, although Sheriff Keller was nice enough to interview him and let him look at Archie’s file, all Jughead had done was stare at the printed words, “Status: Deceased” and felt this sudden, white hot urge to ugly cry until somebody came in the room to comfort him. But the words stay stuck firmly at the bottom of his throat.

Betty’s face twists in surprise, and for a moment, she just looks scared, utterly afraid of what they both know is true: that Archie really is dead and she won’t find a way to resurrect him. Jughead sinks back into the booth with shame pooling deep in his stomach. "There’s just no point_," _he tells her, softer this time, hoping she’ll listen. "We’re not going to find anything that we like."

Betty’s fists clench, her fingers tighten and tighten into her palms until she finally inhales shakily and says on the breath out, "I just can’t believe he’s gone." That’s when Jughead notices the tears about to spill from her eyes and the heat that’s suddenly come to her cheeks.

He reaches across the table to take her hands in his as the tears start to fall. They slide down her face easily and her shoulders shake with the force of keeping in the sobs that try to rip themselves from her body.

She talks eventually, but it just comes out as a string of half-explained pleas, things like, "Archie was supposed to – when I came back home, he and I were supposed to –" but she cuts herself off before she can finish, and Jughead feels a sick relief at the sight of it. He doesn’t want to hear it. They both know what she was going to say, what they thought would happen, but he doesn’t want to hear it. So he just holds her hands and pries her fingers from themselves when she curls them too easily into the bloody divots in her palms.

Later, when Pop has brought them both milkshakes and Betty is sniffling away the last of her tears, she says, "I miss his warmth the most," and for a moment, Jughead gets hits by a wave of sadness so big that it wipes him out. He feels like he’s sitting on that bench outside of the church again, the grief swirling around his guts like a terrible poison. He feels like he’ll never be able to breathe like he used to, back when Archie was alive.

"Yeah," Jughead agrees, trying to blink back the stinging in his eyes, "Yeah."

Jughead’s not sure why, but he sees Jason Blossom around town more and more after Archie’s death. 

It’s not like he’s looking for him, it’s just like he’s noticing him more. He’s sitting in a corner booth at Pop’s while Jughead slouches over his laptop or he’s buying tickets to the drive-in from Jughead at the box office weekly with a polite, barely-there smile on his face.

Sometimes he comes with his friends, but they seem to whine every time Jason drags them along. "Jesus, I don’t wanna see another foreign film, Blossom," Reggie will say, squirming unhappily as he stands behind Jason in line, "Why d’you always pick the most boring movies?"

Jason just hands Jughead a crisp twenty dollar bill through the glass partition and ignores Reggie.

Jughead gives them their tickets without saying much, and when Reggie mutters, "Why’d you have to break up with Polly and send her to the loony bin? I miss back when she would come to shit like this with you instead of me," Jughead watches the way Jason’s shoulders tense as they walk away.

Jughead watches them hotbox Jason’s car from the projection booth, and he tries not to fixate on how red Jason’s hair looks when he gets up to throw away their trash and the headlights of a nearby car silhouette him, leaving him a shadow of all black but lighting his hair aflame.

Sometimes Jason does come alone to a film, though, much to Jughead’s confusion. Once, he hangs around as the credits roll and Jughead is doing his usual walk around the empty dirt lot, now devoid of all cars except Jason’s, picking up people’s leftover trash and cigarette butts.

Jughead walks around Jason’s car, trying to pick up the nearby garbage without accidentally catching Jason’s eye and then having to initiate conversation out of politeness. Jason, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to care.

"Hey," he calls out, still sitting in the driver’s seat of his old red Cadillac, the window rolled down, "You want the last of this?"

Jughead’s head whips up to see Jason holding his arm out the window, pinching the end of a joint in between his fingers.

"Uhhh," Jughead droles on for a moment, staring at both Jason and his hand blankly as his mind buffers. Then he says, without really meaning to, "Sure." 

He feels unworthy of even being in Jason’s car, like he’s getting dirt and grime on the white seat just by sitting in it, but Jason doesn’t seem to mind. He hands Jughead the roll carefully and Jughead inhales, hoping that it’s not obvious that he’s never done this before. He and Archie went through a phase of stealing cigarettes from FP in the eighth grade, but Jughead was never quite sure they were doing it right. The smoke makes his lungs and throat scream, so he tries to play it cool and cough discreetly into his fist.

Jason sits comfortably in the driver’s seat, drumming on the wheel lightly with his fingers, and Jughead feels like he has to enact _ some _ politeness in exchange for these free drugs Jason has given him out of whatever pity poisons his heart. "What did you think of the movie?" He asks, motioning to the screen fifty feet in front of them that’s finally gone black.

It had been an Ingmar Bergman film, one that Jughead had requested they show. The lack of attendance was astounding, but not surprising. What _ was _ surprising was that Jason Blossom, of all people, had shown up.

Jason looks over at him, lazy but unbothered, and shrugs. "It was good," he says and nothing more.

Jughead snorts. "Do you actually watch the movies or do you just pay fifteen dollars to sit and smoke weed in your car?" He punctuates the end of this sentence by lifting what little is left of the joint to his lips.

Jason lets out a ripple of laughter, so loud and honest that it startles Jughead. "I'm sorry," he says, smiling in a way that makes Jughead’s stomach swoop so hard it almost doesn’t feel pleasant, "I can always take my business elsewhere. I’m sure the two elderly couples that see all these movies can keep the drive-in afloat without my help." Jughead bristles at the words, frowning, and Jason’s face falters, falls back into impassivity. "Sorry, I – that was meant to be a joke. But it didn’t sound like one."

Jughead just shrugs, handing the little stub of a joint in his hand over to Jason – he’s not really sure what you’re supposed to do with it when it’s done – and says nothing. It’s no surprise to anyone in this town that Twilight Drive-In barely gets enough attendance to keep the numbers in the checkbook steady. Jughead has no idea what the finances look like exactly – he gets paid a shitty minimum wage to collect the bills, not to add them up – but it doesn’t take a genius to see how the only time they make bank on a movie is on the weekends when they play the occasional family-fun, classic film, and even then it’s barely enough.

Jason clears his throat. "I’ve seen the movie before," he admits like he’s trying to make up for something, "It’s one of my favorites. My nana had it on DVD when we were kids."

Jughead can’t help it when his lips quirk a little. "A bit of an intense movie to watch as a kid, yeah?" He feels some relief at the fact that Jason _does_ watch the movies he comes to see, that someone other than Jughead might care a fraction about this stupid drive-in.

Jason smiles, but it’s a small smile. "Just a bit," he admits, pressing the stub of the joint out in the little ashtray that’s precariously placed in the cup holder of his car. 

Jughead watches Jason’s hands do this, thinks about how pale they are, how red his knuckles are in contrast to the rest of his skin, thinks about the way his own hands are buzzing, the way his cranium is, and concludes that he might be a little bit high.

"Will you be able to drive home?" Jughead asks, and when all Jason does is shoot him a confused look, Jughead adds on, "You know… ‘cause of the weed."

"Oh," Jason says, an amused smirk characterizing his face, "You don’t need to worry about me, Jones."Jughead immediately feels childish for asking and he fidgets his hands, cracking his knuckles.

"Okay, well," he says all of a sudden, and then opens the passenger door, standing up awkwardly, feeling oddly anxious and a little like he wants to run around to get all of the bad stuff out of his body, "Thanks for the, uh –"

"Yeah, don’t mention it," Jason says, "See you around."

"Uh. Yeah."

Jughead walks back to the projection booth, trying not to watch as Jason’s car rolls out of the lot, the sound of gravel crackling under his tires.

The weed doesn’t hit fully until he’s halfway through counting the register, and when he finally gets into bed a few minutes later after locking up and turning off the electricity, he falls into the first easy sleep he’s had in a long time.

The phone rings, blasting loudly in the dark. Jughead sits up in a panic, scrambling for the bright light of the screen that illuminates a corner of his room. His fingers finally snag it and he drags his thumb across the broken glass without checking to see who’s calling.

"Hello," he breathes out hoarsely into the phone.

There’s silence for a moment, and then. That hitch of breath, the one Jughead remembers so well, the one that’s seared into his brain permanently like a tattoo he didn’t ask for.

The world goes silent for a moment and Jughead loses his sense of balance, the earth’s axis tipping and tipping, his body bending with it.

"Archie?" he asks, sounding so young, but there’s no response, not even an exhale.

When he wakes up the next morning, crumpled uncomfortably on his cot in the stuffy room at the drive-in, he knows it must have been a dream, but part of him wants to believe that he’s not – 

He’s not so sure.

They enter into sophomore year without a hitch. Riverdale High presents itself to them as though it had been suspended in time over summer, waiting until the end of August rolled around and somebody pressed play. Few things change; they get a new vending machine in the student lounge, the music teacher that got hired last year leaves town unexpectedly and Weatherbee scrambles to find a replacement, the football team finally gets new uniforms, ad the two year old dick graffiti on the side of the school is scrubbed off only to be marked again a day later.

The only thing of note is that they have an assembly, a safety reminder disguised as an Archie Andrews memorial. _ What happened to Archie Andrews is a shame and an absolute tragedy, but also don’t hang around Sweetwater at odd hours or next time it’ll be your body the Blossoms pull out of the river. _

Jughead gets Betty to skip it without much convincing. Instead, they sit under the bleachers on the football field and share the carefully cut peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made by Betty’s mom for lunch.

Betty swallows her Adderall in between sips of Diet Coke and she talks and talks and talks, making up for Jughead’s silence. She’s saying something about _The __Blue and Gold_, and it is not lost on Jughead the way she keeps talking about it like she’s just waiting for him to say, _ Gee golly, Betts, being on the school newspaper sounds like a fun old time! I’d love to be your co-editor, _which is not something he wants to do it at all, so he mostly pretends to listen while staring out at the grass through the slats in the bleachers.

They stay like that for a little while, pretending everything is fine, until suddenly Betty’s fingers wave in front of Jughead’s face, her nails polished with a baby pink. "Jughead?" She asks, looking at him with worry, "Are you okay?"

Jughead blinks and clears his throat. "Sorry, yeah," he says and then bites off another chunk of sandwich. "What were you saying? I missed the last part."

Betty frowns, but then she looks away like she’s embarrassed. "No, it’s okay," she says, "I was just – it was just stuff about Polly."

"Oh," he says and thinks of the empty bedroom in Betty’s house that’s been left in tact all these weeks, as though Polly just up and vanished one day and nobody’s noticed yet. He thinks about the last time he saw Betty’s sister, how she was curled up with Jason Blossom on the very same bleachers they’re sitting below, laughing together and staring lovingly at one another. "Do you think Jason loved her?" Jughead asks. The thought is truly out of nowhere, but Betty doesn’t seem to mind.

She eats it up, in fact. Jughead watches her mouth pinch as she rolls her eyes and scoffs. The anger seems to light her up. "No. I mean – have you seen him? He’s barely capable of showing any emotions, God forbid actually feeling them. It’s like he thinks someone’s going to persecute him if he does so much as smile."

Jughead watches Betty grit her teeth, and he thinks for a moment about telling her the way Jason sought him out after the funeral or the quiet smile he gave at Jughead from across the dashboard of his car, but he immediately decides not to. Something about telling her would feel wrong, like he was violating some sort of code between him and Jason, even though nothing like that even exists at all.

"Have you spoken to her recently? Polly?"

Betty just shakes her head sadly. "Only Mom and Dad are allowed to visit her."

They hear the bell ring in the distance and fall into silence, listening to the sudden rumble and chattering of students around them. He overhears a conversation two freshmen are having as they pass by: _My mom says he was on drugs. Steroids. _And, _ Steroids don’t make you wanna jump in a river, dumbass. _ Then in the next moment, _ I don’t know! It’s just what my mom said. Whatever. Anyway, I need your help. I wanna go to Chuck Clayton’s party this weekend, but I’m grounded and I don’t know how – _

Jughead stops listening then. Across from him, Betty fiddles with the metal tab on her Coke, bending it back and forth until it breaks and falls into the empty can.

"It seems funny," Betty says all of a sudden, looking down at her hands, "that the world keeps going on." 

Jughead says nothing. He thinks about what they would be doing if Archie was here and can only conjure up the image of Archie laying down next to them in the grass, his arms behind his head, trying to take a nap before the next bell rings, and Jughead misses him so much he suddenly can’t breathe, like someone’s poked a hole in one of his lungs, all fleshy and exposed.

He closes his eyes and swallows, over and over again, squeezing his hands in the dirt until his palms are full of fistfuls of grass, and he tries his best not to cry.

"Why do you think he was at Sweetwater that day?" Jughead finds himself asking, his voice barely above a whisper, these words betraying every angry thing he’s spat at her in the last month about none of it mattering, anyway.

When he opens his eyes, Betty’s frowning, just frowning. Her lips wobble a little bit and when she looks over at him, he can see the way her eyes have turned glassy and red. 

"I have no fucking clue," she says, her voice thick and wet, and the truth of it resounds between the two of them like an echo.

A new girl moves to town and Jughead discovers her accidentally. 

He notices her at school, first – they’re in the same second period history class – and then he starts seeing her at Pop’s. She mirrors him across the diner, sitting lonely in her own booth, where she usually reads a book or does homework in one of her various journals. The new waitress – a woman Jughead has deduced must be her mother – often brings her coffee, or if it’s the afternoon, then a chocolate milkshake. Jughead’s never seen the girl finish a full cup of either.

Betty visits him one day at the diner, the Friday of their first week of school, and tries to convince him to join _The __Blue and Gold _ without beating around the bush this time."Come on, I’d love to see what you’ve been writing on that laptop all summer." She flashes him a pretty smile, her cheeks rosy from blush and the cold chill of the early autumn wind outside.

Jughead narrows his eyes up at her. "Betty, for the last time: no." He doesn’t want to write about anything anymore. He finds he _ can’t _ write about anything anymore. Can’t write about Archie, can’t write about this town, certainly can’t write about whatever mundane high school event they’re expected to cover at _The __Blue and Gold._

Betty frowns down at the table where’s she’s been stacking sugar packets on top of one another until they build a tower and collapse. "Jughead," she says, but it’s at that exact moment that the new girl walks into the diner and makes to her usual booth. When Betty looks up at Jughead to try and garner his attention again, she finds him looking past her, all the way down the end of the diner. She turns around to follow his eyesight.

"Oh," is all Betty says when her eyes land on the girl. 

Jughead’s forehead wrinkles in confusion. "Do you know her?"

"I gave her a tour the first day of school," Betty says, looking at the girl distantly with a gaze Jughead can’t decode. "She was… a character." There’s something in Betty’s voice that denotes this should be an insult rather than a quirk.

Before Jughead can say something to defend this girl he barely knows out of the one sided kinship he feels with her every time she sits there in her booth, alone, just like he does, Betty swivels back around to him and argues, "Jug, I just think _The __Blue and Gold_ would be great for you. That article you wrote last year about the homecoming dance was a real hit and –"

"Betty, nobody reads the school paper."

Betty lets a frustrated sigh out through her nose and her shoulders deflate in defeat. She uses one of her fingers to knock down the tower of sugar packets she’s made, and they spill onto the table lamely as they fall. She doesn’t look up at him when she says, "I want to write an article about Archie," like it’s a quiet confession. 

A frenzied panic lights up his chest. "No,"Jughead tells Betty firmly, his fingers stilling around the french fry he was just about to pick up. "Betty –"

"Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s a bad idea. You don’t want to do it. You think Archie would have hated it. I know what you’re going to say. I just thought…" she trails off, shaking her head, still not looking at him. 

"You’d be exploiting him."

She whips her head up. Her expression is twisted like she wants to spit something nasty at him, but she just curls her fingers into her hands and holds them there, her jaw tight. "Well," she says, her voice choked up with a flurry of things Jughead doesn’t have the time to understand, "I didn’t think you’d say _that_."

She grabs her backpack with an angry fist and gets up, leaving the packets of sugar splayed all around the table. He lets her leave without saying anything, the feeling of something tight stuck in his throat, and he watches the way the little bell above the door rings in its place when she exits.

In the wake of Betty’s absence, Jughead’s eyes accidentally fall on the girl in the faraway booth and is shocked to find that her gaze is trained on the closed door, where Betty just was. He watches as the girl blinks and then sighs. When she moves to regain her focus toward the book in front of her, she catches Jughead’s eye instead. 

She looks at him curiously, her eyebrows furrowing just a little, but before Jughead can avert his gaze back down to his laptop and pretend like he hadn’t been looking at all, she smiles at him, this little smile of scarlet stained lips with just a twist in the corner of her cheeks.

Her name’s Veronica Lodge. She hates their history teacher and she hates this town and she hates Jughead’s taste in poetry, but she hates her father most of all. 

She and Jughead have that in common.

They get breakfast one morning, all three of them. It goes reasonably well – lots of small talk between Jughead and Veronica with Betty chewing on her sausages and barely saying a word – until halfway through when Veronica casually asks, "So what’s the deal with that one kid who offed himself a couple weeks ago?" She tosses a fry in her mouth easily and smiles up at them like she’s ready to be in on some silly little secret. "It’s about the most interesting thing this town has going for it." 

Jughead’s brain goes blank. The numbness drips down his spine. Betty tenses beside him, her hands tightening around the knife and fork she’s holding to cut her eggs. "His name was Archie and he didn’t _off_ himself."

Veronica frowns at her displeasure. "Oh – it was just what everybody’s saying."

"Well, they’re wrong." Betty tells her, eyes narrowing across the table.

Veronica bristles at the tone of her voice and she raises an eyebrow up in defiance. "What do you think happened then?"

Jughead answers before Betty can. "It doesn’t matter anymore," he says into the air, thinking once more how he wishes the people in this town would stop trying to tear apart the last bit of Archie they have left just so they can find a good mystery to solve. "And it’s none of your business, anyway."

The anger between the two girls dissipates the smallest bit, but he might as well physically feel Betty bite her tongue beside him. He waits for her to say something, but she doesn’t; she just scrapes eggs and hash browns into her mouth and swallows down any angry urge she might have had, shooting an upset look at Jughead like she’s going to crucify him after this for suggesting they be friends with this girl.

Veronica looks between the two of them nervously, and then produces a smile out of nowhere like she’s some politician. "Right, well…" and then fidgets awkwardly. "Anyway – Betty, where did you get your earrings?" Veronica asks, her eyes, anxious and flitting all over, betraying the composure of the rest of her.

"So, she’s awful." 

"Betty, she’s not _awful,_ she just –"

"She just asks us about our dead best friend and acts like it’s a little story she needs to get caught up on before the next episode comes out?"

"She’s new in town, she doesn’t know –"

"She should still have some fucking manners."

"She’s just a little blunt. A little forward."

…

"I think she’s nervous. About fitting in and making friends."

**…**

"I don’t know – I like her."

"Jughead, since when were you open to taking in strays?"

…

"Archie would have hated her." Betty looks away from him after she says this, tearing up bits of her napkin to have something to do with her hands.

It’s a weak jab, an attempt to find steadier footing, and they both know it’s a lie, anyway. He would have thought she was pretty.

"He was our friend," Jughead tells Veronica later. 

Veronica doesn’t say anything at first. She’s too busy peering down at her nails and inspecting where the acrylic has broken off. When she finally looks up at him, she has a carefully crafted smile on her face, one he realizes is hiding her embarrassment. 

"Of course – out of this whole town – the only two friends I make are the orphans,"she says, but when she laughs it’s a little forced. 

She doesn’t say she’s sorry, but Jughead hears it in between her words. Betty would tell him that’s he’s projecting, just hearing what he wants to hear, but Veronica’s got a well-worn copy of _The Secret History _in her bag and she teases him like they’ve known each other for years and she’s looking at him with this sad smile, like she knows he’s about to get angry at her and say that he never wants to see her again, and he wants to be her friend so badly.

He steals a sip of her milkshake. "Well, looks like your stuck with us now. You can’t bring up someone’s dead best friend and then not try to make it up to them afterward."

Veronica laughs, surprised. She slides the milkshake toward him on the table like an offering, and Jughead accepts it with a grin. "I guess so," she agrees.

Somehow – by a miracle of God – he convinces Betty to get breakfast with Veronica again. 

It goes better that time; she and Betty realize they watch the same T.V. shows and that they both had a debilitating crush on Peter Pan from the live-action movie when they were kids. So then Jughead convinces Betty and Veronica to get breakfast again after that. And then again. And then again. 

And then it becomes this sort of tradition, this routine of Jughead scarfing bacon down his throat as fast as he can so they won’t be late to first period, this routine of late, lazy weekend brunches, of Betty ordering milkshakes in the morning, of getting Veronica’s mom to give them a free basket french fries, of watching Veronica pick and pick at the side of fruit she always gets with her pancakes.

Then Jughead finds himself going to the Friday night games with Betty, just like they used to do last year, except instead of looking for Archie’s mop of red hair on the field, they’re watching Veronica’s long, black hair bounce around in a ponytail on the sidelines, her Vixen uniform shining under the lights. Betty watches with a ravenous gaze, not trying very hard to conceal the jealousy that burns brightly in her chest, and Jughead spends most of his time staring down at the muddy hot chocolate in his hands that Betty bought for him from the snack shack, cheering for Veronica in the appropriate places.

Then they’re studying in Veronica’s fancy apartment at the Pembrooke, and Jughead and Veronica are fighting about whatever history assignment they’re partners on. When Veronica hits Jughead in the arm and calls him, _ Dumbhead_, Betty laughs harder than she usually lets herself around Veronica, and Veronica’s eyes light up at the sound, like she's the kid who’s just won the highest prize at the carnival. Jughead can't help but smile at both of them.

Then they’re sitting at Pop’s one day after Veronica’s Vixen practice and Betty’s talking about how her mom is making her buy a homecoming dress even though she doesn’t want to go to the actual dance and Veronica’s picking off parts of her burger that she doesn’t want to eat, and then Veronica’s smiling before looking up at both of them and asking if they want to be her dates.

Somehow, it kind of works between the three of them, in this careful, kind of fragile way that they don’t really talk about. But it works, and it fills up Jughead’s life with some sort of normalcy that he finds he’s devastatingly grateful for.

Jughead goes to the dance in a too big suit that he found at the thrift shop earlier that day and with Veronica and Betty on either side of him. Under her dress, Veronica hides a silver flask that’s somehow engraved with her initials – something Jughead makes fun of her for endlessly – and the three of them take turns sipping from it in the girls’ bathroom until there’s not a drop left. 

Betty’s face flushes easily under the influence of alcohol – her cheekbones turn so pink they match her dress – and Veronica giggles, her laughter echoing high against the walls of the bathroom. Jughead watches as Veronica reaches out her fingers to touch Betty’s face and prod at her hot cheeks until Betty whines that they’re making fun of her. They all laugh it off easily in the next second, Betty snickering with them in between breaths of, "Guys – I’m serious – you guys are – so mean to me – oh my God."

It’s one of those rare nights where Jughead feels like a real teenage boy doing real teenage boy things, like maybe, for a moment, he could be living in some sort of coming-of-age movie with a soundtrack made up of bands his dad listened to as a kid.

But he almost feels a little guilty that he’s enjoying himself when Archie’s still dead. He keeps thinking, _ I should be sad because Archie’s not here, I should be sad that Archie never got to be anything more than a high school freshman, _ but then the thoughts are lost as Veronica accidentally puts her foot in the toilet bowl as she attempts to crouch on the seat, and it makes Betty and Jughead laugh so hard that both of them lose all breath and he’s sure, he’s _ sure _Weatherbee is going to find them in here and drag them out by the ears, but suddenly he doesn’t really care.

They walk into the after party at the Blossom mansion and immediately Reggie Mantle is shoving drinks into their hands, and, like, Jughead’s not going to _ waste _the alcohol or hand it back to Reggie and look like a pussy, so he drinks it. But he thinks he drank too much because suddenly they’re all sitting on a couch in one of the living rooms and Jughead only notices that the empty beer bottle Cheryl’s spinning on her coffee table has come to a stop because of the sudden pain in his arm from where Betty’s clutching onto him with a vice-like grip. 

He goes to say, _ Ow – _but Betty cuts him off.

"Save me," she grinds out through clenched teeth, low enough for only him to hear through the constant chatter of the party, "Save. Me."

Jughead sits there for a moment, trying to figure out what she’s even talking about, but then Cheryl Blossom’s standing above them, looking at Betty and then Veronica, who sits on the other side of him, saying, "Looks like Betty gets to kiss the new girl! Time to go into the closet, ladies."

Jughead watches as Cherly leads Betty and Veronica away. A few people from the circle around them whistle and jeer, mostly upperclassmen guys who had been staring at Betty and Veronica the whole night, anyway. Jughead watches as Veronica looks back at Betty with a timid smile, like she’s trying to reassure her, but Betty just looks back at Jughead, her eyes big and her face pale. Then Cheryl shuffles them into her hallway closet, shuts the door, and sets a timer on her phone for seven minutes.

Jughead tries thinking of all the stunts he could pull to get Betty and Veronica out of there, but when Cheryl looks back at them all and asks, "Who wants to spin the bottle and go next?" Jughead leaps up from the couch and runs toward the other room without a second thought. He figures nothing worse can happen to Betty and Veronica while they’re locked in a closet together anyway, right? 

He works on making himself feel a little less bad about the whole thing as he wonders through the Blossom mansion, looking for an exit outside, somewhere where there’s less people he doesn’t know looking at him with that stare, the one he can’t decode. Is it, _oh, there’s that weird kid, _or, _oh, there’s that weird kid with the dead best friend?_ It seems to be a gamble these days.

He spots the shiny front door and his little tipsy fifteen year old brain can only think of the fresh air outside, the wet grass of the lawn, how nice it might feel to breathe out there, and so he heads toward it without preamble. The moment before his fingers touch the doorknob, something grabs him by the wrist and pulls him away.

Jughead is spun around to find Jason Blossom, tie hanging loosely around the collar of his shirt, first three buttons undone, cradling a brown beer bottle in the other hand that’s not grabbing onto Jughead, a black sash around his torso that reads, _ Homecoming King. _Huh. Jughead wonders if he was in the bathroom watching Veronica wipe the toilet water off of her leg when Jason had been crowned.

"Everything alright?" He asks Jughead, and Jughead just looks up at him with a confused tilt to his head.

"Oh, uh,"Jughead replies, "I just needed air?"

Jason leans in a little closer then, and Jughead can suddenly smell his cologne; it’s potent and very boyish, but smells like it might have cost a pretty penny. Jughead tries not to notice all these new things about Jason’s face that he’s suddenly learning from being so close, like the small splatter of freckles all along his cheeks that have faded from lack of sun exposure or how soft his skin looks, like Jughead could trail his fingers along it easily without the catch of stubble. 

"There’s a bunch of people smoking out there. Doubt you’ll find the fresh air you’re looking for." He says, gesturing toward the front door, and then pointing back to the staircase behind him. "There’s a balcony upstairs."

"Oh – alright," Jughead says, and he thinks that will be it, that he’ll remember this odd moment tomorrow and think back to it trying to figure out why Jason was even there to grab Jughead’s hand in the first place, but then Jason’s turning around and leading Jughead up the grand staircase without letting go of his wrist.

There’s people from the living room calling Jason’s name, girls giggling for him and his jock buddies waiting to shotgun a beer with him, but Jason doesn’t seem to register their voices as he brings Jughead up to the dark and shadowy hallways of Thornhill’s second story.

It only takes them a moment to find whatever door Jason’s looking for, and then he finally lets go of Jughead in order to turn the handle. He walks through the room easily to get to the set of french doors on the other side, but Jughead trails behind slowly, his eyes darting around the room from corner to corner. 

It’s clean, but in a particular way, like a maid’s just come through and straightened everything up. There’s a four poster bed with a red velvety duvet on top, and for a moment Jughead just thinks about falling into it, the way the mattress would cushion his weight easily and how quickly he could fall asleep.

"Are you coming?" Jason asks. Jughead whips around to find him standing on the balcony attached to the room, taking a small sip from his beer. He’s covered completely in a blue moonlight that cancels out the red of his hair and the sight of it makes Jughead breathe a little easier.

He steps out onto the balcony and is pleased at the way the breeze soothes his skin and ruffles his hair. Jason tips the beer toward him and Jughead takes it because it seems childish not to. Jason watches him for a moment as he takes a swig, and Jughead wonders why this is happening, why either of them are here, why Jason had grabbed his wrist so adamantly.

"How was the dance?" Jason asks, clearing his throat and taking back the beer, and Jughead searches his mind for why the fuck Jason Blossom would even want to have a conversation with him right now, why he called out to Jughead all those weeks ago and gave Jughead the last of his weed.

"It was good," Jughead says, trying to focus on anything besides his oncoming existential crisis. He points to the sash around Jason’s torso when he asks, "You?"

Jason laughs. "I forgot I still had this thing on." He shimmies out of it easily, dropping it on the ground without a thought. "Trust me, yours was probably better than mine."

But Jughead thinks of the girls downstairs waiting for Jason to come back to them and all the people who must have clapped when he got on stage to be crowned king of the school. "You know," Jughead starts, and then looks down at the floor so he doesn’t have to look Jason in the eyes, "It’s – like it’s great you’re being nice to me and all because you found the dead body of my best friend, but – well – we really don’t have to do this."

Jughead only looks up when the silence has lasted too long for comfort and the chill of the night around them starts to make his skin crawl with unease. What he finds when he raises his head is Jason looking at him with an unwavering gaze, the kind of gaze that makes Jughead feel like he’s glass that Jason can see right through. He suddenly feels ridiculously juvenile in his too big suit, his shirt that’s tucked into his pants haphazardly, his hair which has probably been tousled enough by the wind to make him look wild. And Jason just keeps staring at him.

Jason then reaches into his jacket and pulls out a joint from a pocket somewhere. He extends it to Jughead, and when Jughead only looks at it with wide eyes, he wiggles it between his fingers. "You should have this."

"What – I don’t –" Jughead’s already had more to drink than he should have, the only other time he’s smoked weed was with Jason in his car, and neither of these things add up to create an appealing scenario in his head right now. "I don’t want it."

"It’ll help you not be so stressed."

"I’m not stressed!"

"You just attacked me for bringing you up to my balcony so you could breathe in the fresh air you so desperately wanted."

"I didn’t_ attack _ you," Jughead insists, but Jason’s not really listening as he lights the joint and takes a drag, blowing out smoke that smells so distinctly of _ weed _it makes Jughead wrinkle his nose.

He watches Jason take another drag, the end of it lighting up bright orange, before Jason blows it out. Something about the way his face looks when he exhales and how easily he holds the smoke in between his fingers makes Jughead squirm. It feels like he’s watching a bad boy character in a movie make his entrance, about to say his first lines.

"Don’t they drug test you guys on the football team?" Jughead asks suddenly, eyeing the joint. 

Jason taps the ash out over the balcony, moving closer to Jughead to do it, and the mix of his cologne and the smell of weed has Jughead’s brain spinning. 

"Sometimes," Jason admits, offering the thing to Jughead again and shrugging when Jughead shakes his head, "But not me."

Jughead frowns and looks at him shrewdly. "That doesn’t bother you? That they bend the rules for you just because you’re the golden boy?" The words come out a little nasty, and he wonders if he would be speaking this bravely if he wasn’t a bit drunk.

Jason grins, amused, and Jughead is surprised at how easily it lights up his whole face. A thought bounces around in his head that he wants to tell Jason,_You should smile like that all the time, it makes you look very pretty, _ but he’s not _ that _drunk, thank God.

"If I don’t get drug tested, I don’t get kicked off the team. If I don’t get kicked off the team, we do well in games. If we do well in games, the school gets more money." Jason licks his lips and grins again. His teeth look electric white in the moonlight. "Do you really think I’m the golden boy?"

Jughead feels his face turn red even as he says, "That’s a stupid question. Everyone knows you’re the star player. You just admitted it yourself."

Jason lets out the ghost of a laugh. "You’re fun like this."

Jughead’s face warms even more. "Like what?" He asks, his voice turning defensive.

"Like, when you get drunk and talk back."

Every word Jason says makes Jughead feel like he’s losing the upper hand in this conversation and he can’t come up with any ways to try and gain it back. "I'm just as mean when I’m sober, trust me," he says a little lamely and realizes that it had sounded less sad in his head.

Jason just takes another drag, shakes his head. "No, you’re… you seem a lot lonelier then."

The comment freezes Jughead in place, coating him with the uncomfortable blanket of shame and embarrassment of being seen.

He takes in a sharp breath, his mind searching for anything tangible to be able to reply with, but before he can think of anything, someone is walking through the open door of the bedroom and Betty’s pink dress is flashing in the corner of his eye. She lets out a shrill, "Jughead?"

He turns to be met with a displeased Betty, her mouth in a deep, deep frown. She looks a little panicked, a few too many curls out of line on her head and her chest heaving heavy breaths, but she still manages to give Jason the nastiest look she can manage. 

Jason just looks back at Jughead once, giving him a smile so small that when Jughead will think back on it later he’ll convince himself it wasn’t there, and then he moves away from both of them easily, walking back into the room. "I’ll see you around," he calls back nonchalantly as he strolls through the open door, giving Betty only a reserved, momentary glance.

Betty gangs up on Jughead immediately. "What were you doing with him?" Her nose wrinkles as she looks him up at down. "You smell like _weed_," she says accusingly.

Jughead shakes his head as though it will clear his thoughts. "Nothing. He was – I wasn’t feeling well so I came up here and he found me." Betty relaxes only a little, letting her shoulders droop and crossing her arms over her chest, and it’s in this moment that Jughead realizes she’s alone. "Where’s Veronica?"

Betty gets that panicked, wild look in her eyes again. "She left early," Betty says shortly. "Come on, it’s late. Let’s go home. It’s cold out here." She wraps her arms tight around herself and it makes her look small, like the girl he knew in elementary school.

They hitch a ride easily with some upperclassmen friend of Polly’s that Betty knows, and when the girl asks where she should drop Jughead off, Betty pipes up with, "He’s coming home with me," without asking Jughead beforehand. As the girl and her boyfriend whistle lowly and laugh at the two of them in the back, Betty latches onto one of his arms like a lifeline and leans into him. Jughead feels his face go hot in embarrassment.

He whispers to her, "Your mom –"

"We won’t tell. You can leave before she wakes up." When Jughead looks at her unsteadily, she begs, "Please?" with her eyes big and wide and terrified for reasons she doesn’t seem to want to tell him, and he lets it go.

Jughead barely sleeps.

The silhouette of Betty’s body partly eclipses the window of the neighboring house, and Jughead stares at it for so long that the image is burned behind his eyelids when he shuts them.

This is the closest he’s been to Archie’s room since Archie died, and it feels a little bit too much for his brain. He thinks naively that maybe he got a second hand high from Jason because thoughts of Archie play around in his head like mush, and he can’t stop thinking about it all, can’t pause or even try to think about something else. At one point, he thinks he’s going to throw up from all the buzzing anxiety in his stomach, and he turns over just in case he needs to make a break for the bathroom, but then the next thing he knows he’s asleep.

He has dreams of the window for the rest of the night, dreams where Archie’s on the other side of the glass looking back at him.

Veronica, despite their sudden friendship with her, had never come around to find them at lunch because she’d been so quickly snatched up by Cheryl Blossom. "It’s a mandatory Vixen thing," Veronica had said to them once with a roll to her eyes, "Cheryl loves to use any free time to remind us how beneath her we are, and also how we need to get better at our high kicks." 

And so Jughead and Betty had easily kept their routine of under the bleacher peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Betty sipping on whatever diet soda she could get her hands on, talking about the most mundane things about their day. Sometimes Betty still occasionally tried to convince him to join_The __Blue and Gold, _but even that had died down. They rarely talked about Archie anymore; somehow he had silently become a forbidden topic, something too big to even touch.

Today, though, feels particularly empty without Veronica’s presence. They hadn’t even gone for their usual Monday Pop’s run before school, and Jughead keeps waiting for Betty to bring it up somehow, mention or at the very least acknowledge Veronica’s existence, but it’s halfway through lunch and there’s been nothing, not even an implication, and so Jughead eats the last of his sandwich and pries.

"What happened at Cheryl’s party?" He asks, trying to lick the jelly film off his teeth.

Betty stares out through the slats in the bleachers, toward the football field. "What do you mean?" She asks, her voice flat, and takes a sip of her soda.

Jughead holds back a sigh. "I mean, what happened in the closet? With you and Veronica?"

"Nothing." Betty says quickly, so quickly it sounds venomous. She sits statically, unmoving, and then she says, "I don’t think we should hang around with her anymore. Veronica. She was hanging off Cheryl’s arm all night, doing anything to get in her ranks, and I don’t want to hang out with anyone who thinks Cheryl’s someone to impress."

Jughead holds his tongue, and he thinks of the way Veronica never takes her eyes off Betty when they’re in a room together, how he’s seldom seen Veronica look Cheryl’s way without a roll of her eyes beforehand.

Jughead can see through Betty’s words so well it’s a little exhausting. Anybody could. He wants to tell her, _ Maybe you shouldn’t be so obvious, _but they’re still at that age where they don’t know how to deal with the truth even when it shows up at their doorstep and begs to be let in, and so he doesn’t dispute her, doesn’t say anything at all.

Jughead finds Veronica on his own time, of course. They still sit on opposite ends of the diner at the end of the day, and the moment Jughead’s finished with his half-assed essay that was supposed to be due a week ago – Jughead has found that a surprising amount of teachers will smudge your due dates if you gently remind them that the weight of a dead best friend hangs around you like a noose – he closes up his laptop and walks until he can fall into the other side of her booth. 

Veronica doesn’t even look up from her book when she says, "Fancy seeing you here, Forsythe." Betty had drunkenly told her about Jughead’s real name during homecoming and Veronica has not let a chance to call him Forsythe slide by since.

"I could say the very same to you, Miss Lodge." She’s got a half empty coffee cup and a barely touched plate of fries in front of her. Jughead steals one without asking and Veronica doesn’t flinch. "How goes it?"

"Well, Betty’s been ignoring me all weekend, I’ve got a three page paper due tomorrow on this book I don’t even like, and yesterday my father called me on the phone from jail to ask me how my new life in this terrible town is." She puts the book down to look at him, her face carefully blank. "So, I’m doing great. I’m having a wonderful time, actually."

Jughead steals another fry. "What happened with you and Betty?"

Veronica brings the book back up to her face as though it might shield her from her mistakes. "Ask me later, Forsythe. I have a paper to write." She pauses. "You can take the fries."

Jughead doesn’t have to be asked twice, so he slides the plate toward him, grabbing a few to stuff into his mouth for good measure. "You know, she wouldn’t tell me either."

Enough of her face isn’t covered by her paperback that Jughead can see the way Veronica’s expression flickers and her fingers tighten on the spine of the book. "Jughead, leave me alone," she says, but this time it just sounds sad, like she’d really rather be anywhere else but here.

So Jughead takes the fries and turns to head toward his booth, but the moment he sees the back of a red mop of hair sitting where he was camped out only a few minutes ago, he freezes. Jason turns and his profile comes into view; he looks impassive as always, one arm slung on the back of the booth, wearing his varsity jacket like he never washes the damn thing. 

Jughead sets his shoulders, wiping away the sudden panic in his chest as he steps toward his booth, thinking about all the ways he’ll chew Jason out, say he doesn’t need whatever pity Jason keeps trying to throw at him, but then Jughead walks up to his seat and Jason looks at him and smiles. A real, soft smile, like he’s actually happy to see Jughead, like they know things about each other beyond the superficial. 

"Hey," he says with a nod, "I just ordered us both burgers."

Jughead blinks in surprise. "What?" He asks, his eyebrows furrowing. "You didn’t have to do that." He knows it comes out defensive but he can’t help it. He puts the plate of Veronica’s fries down on the table and slides into his side of the booth where all of his stuff still is. 

Jason shrugs. "Yeah, I know. I was actually wondering if you could help me with my English essay." He says, having the decency to look a little sheepish at showing up unannounced and asking for Jughead’s labor. "I thought a burger would be good payment?"

"How did you know where I was?"

Jason cocks his head to the side and looks at Jughead like he’s telling a funny joke. "Because you’re… always here?" 

Jughead opens his mouth to say something, but closes it once he realizes he doesn’t have any sort of witty response beside, _Yeah, I guess you’re right. _He scratches the back of his head. "How long is the essay?"

"Five pages."

"You buy me a milkshake too and give me twenty dollars and then we’ll call it even."

Jason looks like he could almost laugh. "Jesus, I’m not asking you to write the whole thing. Just to help out a little."

Jughead stares at him steadily and shrugs. Those are his terms. He knows Jason can meet them.

Jason sighs. He lifts his hand and waves Pop Tate over. "What flavor do you want?"

Veronica texts him later that night.

_ did I see you having a dalliance with Riverdale’s most precious boy on the other side of pop’s today? 👀_

Jughead doesn’t reply right away. It’s only after he plays the last movie for the three, maybe four people at the theatre and the owner closes up shop and sees him off with a good night does Jughead text back, _ He bought me a burger in exchange for my fine english skills. Can’t say no to that. How did that essay go? _

_ haha. let’s not talk about that steaming pile of garbage, shall we? _ She sends another message quickly after. _ maybe _ ** _i’m _ ** _ the one who should have swept you off your feet and enlisted your help. _

_ I’m sure you did better than you think. You, me, and Betty should get Pop’s again sometime soon. _

Just as Veronica replies, _ that sounds like something you should talk to betty about, _an unknown number texts him and Jughead goes to check his messages.

There’s one from Fred that he’s been ignoring for days. _ Hey Jug , you should come over for dinner sometime . Mary’s out here for a couple more weeks and we would both love to see you . Let me know . _and there’s a few unanswered texts from Betty about their math homework, but the unrecognizable number sits at the top. His phone buzzes again with another text.

_ Thanks for letting me bother you today. I look forward to doing it again sometime. _

_ This is Jason by the way. Cheryl gave me your number. _

And then one last final buzz: _ :) _

He hadn't thought Jason was a smile-y type of texter. Jughead looks at the stupid smiley face for a beat too long, a grin on his own face, unbeknownst to himself.

Betty runs the article on Archie anyway. 

Jughead accidentally discovers it, picks up the issue of _ The Blue and Gold _ that his history teacher’s placed right by the door on the way out of class and reads the words _In Memoriam_ just as he sees a black and white photo of Archie smiling underneath it. Jughead has just enough time in the seconds before he throws it in the trash to realize that it’s a photo _ he _took of Archie last year, and his stomach sinks with this strange, potent feeling of betrayal. 

He wanders down the hall aimlessly, his heart beating fast and his mind clouded with thoughts that are so clumped together he can barely separate them to single out whatever he’s feeling. It’s only after the bell rings does Jughead suddenly jerk back to reality and realize that he’s alone in the empty hallway and that he’s going to be late for his biology class.

He doesn’t bring it up to Betty. In fact, he mostly wills it out of his mind because he finds it easier that way. He’s basically forgotten he ever saw the article by lunch and is laughing as he watches Betty attempt to stuff all her textbooks in her locker when Veronica passes by them in the hallway, tailing behind Cheryl. She says with a flash of a too bright smile, "The paper was great today, Betty. I’m sure Archie would have loved it."

Betty smiles back at her politely, but the second Veronica’s out of earshot, her face falls. She turns back around to her locker, carefully avoiding Jughead’s gaze, and she mutters bitterly to herself, "How would she know." 

Jughead tries to stomp out the itch of frustration that’s taken of his brain as he remembers _In Memoriam_ printed right above Archie’s face on the front cover of the paper. "You used a picture I took," he comments, his voice even.

Betty’s silent for a moment. "It was a nice picture."

Jughead thinks of the day he took it. Spring had just started and Archie had eagerly woken Jughead in the morning after a sleepover, saying that the sun would be out that day. They spent the rest of the afternoon lazing around the green grass of Archie’s backyard, Archie talking his mouth off about where they should go on their road trip this summer and Jughead had sat there listening, playing around with the camera his mom had sent to him for Christmas. 

A black hole of grief suddenly finds residence in his body and he feels it taking him slowly. Jughead squeezes his eyes shut as a wave of frustration and annoyance and, most of all, debilitating sadness washes over him. He grinds out through his teeth, "Betty, Archie’s more than just your cover story. I know you want people to actually _read_the paper, but –"

Betty slams her locker door closed with enough force to make him jump. "I know he’s more than just a cover story, Jughead. Did you actually read the piece at all?" She spits at him. When his only response is silence, she just sighs in frustration. "You don’t get to have the final say on everything when it comes to Archie. You don’t get to rule every conversation about him." 

"I’m not –"

"You _are_ –" 

"Oh man, are Romeo and Juliet having a fight?" Reggie’s voice carries from across the hall to them with a chorus of chuckles following his words.

Betty and Jughead look over to find Reggie smiling at the with a dumb, smug look on his face and practically half of the football team behind him, giggling like they’re the funniest people in the world.

"Reggie, that is truly the least creative thing you could have ever come up with." Jughead says with a deadpan voice, trying hard to function after the hurt and guilt that Betty’s words have incited in him. He spares quick glance at her when he says, "And we’re not dating."

"Jughead, don’t even bother, let’s just go," Betty says desperately, tugging at his sleeve. She keeps shooting dirty looks to the group of boys, but not saying anything more.

"Oh really?" Reggie inquires, smirk on his face, and then his eyes turn toward Betty. He makes a show out of very obviously looking her up and down. "Well then, Betty, you and I really gotta go to Pop’s sometime. You know, your sister was my first choice, but Jason called dibs on her before I could, so…" 

The boys behind him laugh like they’re watching a play. White, hot anger flares up in Jughead, but just as he moves to go forward, someone steps in front of Betty and Jughead, blocking their view.

"God, Mantle. Have some fucking class. Nobody wants to touch your creepy dick." Veronica’s voice is sharp as she stands with her hands on her hips, looking Reggie down with a scowl.

Jughead can see over Veronica’s shoulder the way Reggie’s face twists, like he’s about to say something to rival her fury, but then someone yells, "Reggie!" commandingly from the other end of the hallway, and they all peer to find Jason Blossom watching with vague disinterest, his arms crossed, like maybe he’d been watching the whole time. Something brighter than anger fizzles inside of Jughead’s chest, something sour.

Reggie mumbles something to his friends as they bumble down the hallway to their boy king, laughing and shoving at each other’s shoulders, and then the mass of football players is gone, turning the corner at the end of the hallway to disappear.

When Jughead looks back at Betty, he can see the flex of her jaw muscle, like she’s grinding her teeth in hopes that they might break. "Hey," he says quietly, trying to quell his own anger and moving to hold her hand, "Hey, it’s fine. They’re gone now. They’re stupid, you know that." 

Veronica reaches out to touch Betty on the arm, but hesitates and let’s it fall back by her side. "I’ll kill them," she says point blank, "I’ll find a way to hang Reggie up by his pants on the school’s flag post." Betty, who is looking down at her feet, suddenly lets out a bark of laughter, and the shake of her shoulders shocks Jughead enough that he tenses his grip around her hand. Veronica’s smile is soft, warm like the sun, and she knocks her feet against Betty’s to get her attention. "Jughead’s right, too. They’re stupid meatheads and you shouldn’t listen to them." 

Betty doesn’t say anything at first. She just lets go of Jughead’s hand and turns around to finally close her locker. When she turns back around to them, she’s assembled a careful and assembled calm on her expression, but she’s still red around the edges. "It’s whatever," she says, but Jughead knows it is decidedly _ not _ whatever, "Come on, we should go to lunch."

Veronica looks at Jughead with wide, worried eyes, but Jughead just sighs and moves along behind Betty towards the door that leads to the field where their blessed, shaded underside of the bleachers exists.

They’re almost halfway down the hall when Betty glances back and then full on stops in the way of Jughead’s path. "Veronica," she calls back, "Are you coming?"

Veronica has only just started to turn around and head the other way, presumably to Cheryl or wherever else it is she goes at lunch. She turns back around at the sound of Betty's voice, and Jughead can see the way her eyebrows shoot up in surprise. Betty must see it, too, because she grimaces and then looks down at her feet in embarrassment. 

"Oh, yeah," Veronica says, her cheeks rosy, "Sure." 

Veronica catches up to them easily, weaving through the other students in the hallway to make it to Jughead's side as they follow Betty out the double doors. Veronica smiles at Jughead, relief and happiness obviously on her face, and he grins back, bumps their shoulders together in playful comradery.

Jughead’s phone buzzes with a text message much, much later in the day, when it’s just hit nighttime and he’s running a film tape for the mothers who bring their kids for family discount day.

_ Sorry about Reggie. _

Jughead knows who it is right away even though he still hasn’t given a name to Jason’s contact. He keeps it in his notifications unopened because it’s easier that way, but for a moment he almost thinks about picking up his phone and calling Jason just to rush out, _ What did you do to Polly, _and, _ Betty’s told me a lot of things but I don’t know if they’re true and I don’t think she does either, _ and, _ Who even are you half the time why do you have my phone number why do insist on contacting me why do you look like my dead best friend why wasn’t it you who drowned instead, _and, _ Do you still love her? _

He leaves it on his desk, though, untouched.

Jughead has scaled the Andrews’ house so many times that he barely has to think about where to put his feet or what ledges to grab up onto as he climbs it anymore.

His mind is blank of thoughts as he scales it that night, the cold air whipping around him. He methodically places his foot against the plant scaffolding Fred has set up, then lifts himself up onto the first floor roof that sticks out, then shimmies over, and moves and moves across the side of the house until eventually he lifts himself up and onto the window sill of Archie’s bedroom.

For a moment, he looks into the dark room through the glass. It's all covered in shadows with the barest trace of moonlight and he wishes so badly that Archie could just be asleep in his bed, that he’d be there when Jughead slips inside. The desire makes Jughead feel empty all of a sudden, achingly so, but he tries to push it down as fast as it comes because he’s not quite sure what he’d do if he didn’t.

He jiggles the window open easily, a little bit surprised that it’s still unlocked, and ducks inside. It’s eerily silent in the room, so silent that it causes a ringing in Jughead’s ears as he stands there on the carpet, looking around. He turns Archie’s desk light on, even though he’s pretty sure he can hear the distant static of the T.V. downstairs that Fred must be watching while having dinner, and he waits as the corners of the room flood with light.

Jughead drags his fingers across the wooden desk. It has at papers messily strewn across it, music sheets, penciled in with notes and lyrics, things of Archie’s that Jughead’s never seen before. There’s a framed photo of Archie, Betty, and himself as kids in between the piles of things, and Jughead can see the fine layer of dust that’s settled on top of it.

They’re young in it. Archie looks brightly at the camera, thirteen and acne-prone, his eyes lit up by the simple happiness of being a kid – the way Jughead will think of him always, even in years time, even after everyone else recalls him as Archie Andrews with the chiseled jawline and the strong biceps – and Jughead suddenly has to look away.

He wanders around the room slowly, eventually toeing his shoes off and leaving them by the door. He feels a little bit like a police officer at the scene of a crime who’s trying not to touch anything too much in case he messes up the evidence, but at the same time he’s looking at all these pieces and mementos from Archie’s life and finding that he’s completely unable to put any of it together. He’s not even really sure what he thought he would find by coming here.

Jughead makes it to closet and slides open the door. He trails his hand down the line of hung up clothes, his nails catching on fabric as he gets to the back of the rack and finds Archie’s old flannels, the ones he used to wear all the time during middle school, the ones that used to be Fred’s.

Jughead finds a deep maroon one with little white lines shooting across it, weaving into plaid, and without really thinking about it he puts it on. It’s just as soft as he always remembers it was when hugging Archie, but the moment he smells it – that fresh scent of laundry detergent Fred always buys mixed with the small amount of Archie’s cologne the wash could never get out – Jughead’s overwhelmed with the presence of Archie.

It makes him remember everything from late afternoons studying in the library at school, to going to the drive-in on weekends, to ordering french fries at Pop’s just after going to the comic shop on Sundays and buying the cheapest issues they could find. He thinks of Archie’s stupid hair, the way he always waited too long to get it cut, and his warmth, the way he would always let Jughead press against his side, Jughead’s cheek on his shoulder and his fingers snaking around Archie’s wrist.

The grief comes all at once, wracking over Jughead until suddenly he has to crumple into himself. He bends over, unable to breath without sucking in air through his teeth desperately, and he folds his arms over his torso, tucking his hands into his armpits.

He stumbles toward the bed, his eyes and nose stinging with the threat of tears and his chest seemingly about to collapse in on itself, bury his heart under his own bones. He falls into the sheets of the bed, wheezing, and tucks his body into itself until he’s so crammed into his own space that he has nowhere else to go.

The smell of Archie on the bed only proves to be more overwhelming. It triggers something awful in him, finally unfurls the last tuft of stubborn resolution Jughead had left in him, and he cries.

Grief is an awful, terrible thing. It sits inside of you like a toothache, ringing as a dull pain in the background of your life until suddenly it’s rotted the whole back part of your mouth. Jughead knows this and he’s felt the ache, the way it stings and catches him off guard so often that it shoves the breath right out of him, but he had done so well at not feeling it fully, at having moments of tears and labored breath, but still ignoring it and packing it all away in a broken box that had _for later _written on the front.

The last few months had felt like a dream. Everything since waking up that Monday morning with a missed phone call from Fred on his phone and that weird sense of knowing in the pit of his stomach, everything since then had been fake, like maybe some part of Jughead had just been getting from the next day to the next day to the next, the only thing driving his actions being the childish sliver of thought in the back of his head that one day he’d wake up and Archie would be there again. They’d say sorry and promise to never get mad at each other anymore and sophomore year would start over and Archie would get to meet Veronica and Jughead would never care if someone like Jason Blossom looked his way and they’d be happy, they would. 

His tears leak out all over the comforter and all over Archie’s pillows, his snot following soon after. He does a terrible job at trying to stop the strangled noises of his sobs from coming out of his mouth, but he hopes, at least, that none of it is loud enough to alert Fred.

He doesn’t know when he falls asleep or how long it takes, just that the next morning he wakes up with a hand in his hair, ruffling it softly, a calloused thumb smoothing over his forehead. His whole body is tense and sore, and his face feels like someone’s rubbed sandpaper over and over on it. His chest feels awfully empty, but that’s nothing new.

The hand pushes his hair away from his forehead softly. "Jughead," Fred sighs, sounding a little more tired than sad. 

Jughead’s immediately expecting a lecture or maybe a full-blown fight. He tenses, suddenly convinced that Fred’s about to grip at the roots of his hair and drag him to the floor, spitting something vicious about treading on private property and in his dead son’s room – even though that’s not in Fred’s nature, even though Fred isn’t like FP – but instead Fred just takes his hand and pats Jughead on the shoulder, mentioning nothing about the fact that Jughead’s currently clothed in one of Archie’s old shirts, and he says, "I have to go to work, but there’s a plate of food on the desk for you."

He gets up just like that, the wooden floors creaking under his weight as he moves out of the bedroom and into the hallway. Jughead stays tensed in his fetal position, barely breathing, until he hears the car door slam from outside and Fred’s old engine eventually peel down the driveway and out of the neighborhood. 

The silence of the house swarms him. He wonders where Vegas is. He wonders if Mary’s still in town. He wonders at what point in the night that Fred figured out he was up here. He wonders if Fred checks Archie’s room every night before he goes to bed, just out of habit, or maybe out of a little insane hope that he’ll open the door one day and find Archie sat there, waiting.

He sits up eventually and looks toward Archie’s old desk. On top is a white plate, covered in scrambled eggs and steaming bacon with a cup of something, maybe coffee, sat next to it. Jughead gets up, his mind suddenly unclouded at the thought of food, but when he gets closer, he notices a sticky note slapped haphazardly on the side of the mug.

_ Use the front door next time OK? _

Jughead takes the framed picture of the three of them back home with him. 

He doesn’t even realize he’s brought the flannel with him too until he gets irritably warm halfway through the day and has to take it off, suddenly realizing he has a whole other layer on that he forgot about.

He balls the cloth in his hands for a moment, almost like he’s going to throw it away, but then he just carefully drapes it on the back of his desk chair.

It’s late October and they’re running a marathon of Halloween movies, something Jughead suggested they do this year. A pleasantly surprising amount of families and couples have been attending the showings, generating a welcome sum of money for the drive-in. 

It also causes Jughead to be a little busier. He’s rushing to hand out tickets to the large line of guests before the movie starts, he’s helping out in concessions with the weird blond kid who’s the only other employee, he’s running around the lot while the start of the movie plays and helping annoying teenagers adjust their car radios to the right frequency in order to hear the movie’s sound.

It’s this busyness that makes him wave Jason off easily when he buys a ticket for that night’s showing of _ Creature From the Black Lagoon _and to quickly forget that Jason had even been there at all, too focused on the chaos of the theatre around him to bother with the mess of feelings that crops up in his chest at the sight of Jason's face.

Jughead finally settles into the projection halfway through the movie, sitting down in his chair with an audible sigh. There had been two sets of couples having sex in the back of their cars who he’d had to break up and some kid had ordered five corn dogs for himself _ right _ before the movie was suppose to start, just as everyone else decided they needed concessions as well. He’d had a _ night _and his feet hurt so bad from standing for so long.

He watches the film play for a few minutes, and then reaches for his math textbook. Practically the only time he ever gets work done anymore is during showings, but even then it's a rare occurrence. Jughead had gotten in the recent habit of not turning in half his assignments and he was sure he was failing most of his classes as a result of this, but his teachers had probably deemed that it was still too close to The Incident to rightfully bring anything up. Sometimes he wonders if FP’s getting calls about it all, if Weatherbee's waking him up in the middle of his noon booze snooze to say, _ We’re worried about your son, _ and if FP replies, _ What? What son? _

Jughead’s just getting started on his homework when he gets easily distracted for a moment and looks up to watch just a couple more seconds of the film. It’s his favorite part of the movie, the part where the creature is swimming through the lake while the two men try to hunt it down. As he watches the scene, mesmerized, some shadows near a few of the cars closest to him catch his attention.

Jason’s car is easy to recognize even in the dark; the unique silhouette of his convertible Cadillac with the top all the way up stands out like a white dot on a black piece of paper. A duo of boys loiter around the driver's seat window, their torsos bulky from the varsity jackets wrapped snugly around them. Jughead thinks it’s lucky that Jason parked in the last row or someone who might have parked behind him would have certainly yelled at the way the tall boys were blocking the movie, and then Jughead would probably have to go and deal with _ that _too.

The two boys stand there for a moment, seemingly conversing through the window with Jason, who’s still sitting in his car. Jughead spies on them easily and his eyes can just barely make it out when Jason hands them something small and they hand him back something flat and long.

It takes a moment for Jughead to realize that it's a stack of cash, and then he leans back in his chair and groans loudly, the sound echoing off the walls of his small room.

Doing drugs at the drive-in is one thing. Jughead probably shouldn’t allow it, but he lets people get away with a lot of stuff at the showings where barely anyone comes. He’s not going to give people even _ more _reason to not come to this place. 

Dealing drugs, however, during a movie where more than two dozen people came, including a few parents with their kids? Jughead has, like, a personal and moral duty to shut that down.

He also doesn’t want to make a scene _ during _the movie, though. He knows Jason well enough by now to guess that he won’t really cause any more trouble than what he’s just done, so Jughead lets the film run, trying to focus on the math homework he has to do and failing miserably, letting his brain be consumed by the thrum of anxiety he has at knowing he has to confront Jason Blossom in t-minus however many minutes.

When the credits start to roll and cars start to turn on and drive away, Jason’s car stays firmly put, as always.

Jughead pushes his textbook to the side and shuts the projector off. The kid at concessions bugged off thirty minutes ago, so Jughead makes sure the security gate is down and locked over the window counter before he begrudgingly makes the walk toward Jason’s stupid red car that’s parked like it’s waiting for him. It's easy to see the silhouette of Jason’s profile in the front seat, his face lit up by the bright screen of his phone.

Jughead makes his way up to the car and raps on the window of the driver’s side with his knuckles. When Jason rolls down the window, Jughead leans down a little and asks him, "Are you dealing drugs at my place of work?"

Jason looks innocently up at him, his face blank. "I’ve never seen a drug in my life."

Jughead’s upset that his mouth automatically cracks into a bit of a smile, so he tries to tamper it down. "Do you have any other hobbies besides selling weed and watching old films?"

"Yeah," Jason says, "I also sell coke."

Jughead suddenly loses his balance against the car. He splutters, "What the fuck –"

"Or 'Jingle Jangle', whatever you wanna call it –"

"You can’t do that here. What the fuck?"

"Please, like I would sell coke out of my _car_." Jason rolls his eyes, like Jughead’s dumb for not knowing these apparently obvious rules of drug dealing, "I only sell weed and pills from here."

"Are you out of your mind?"

"Not particularly," Jason shrugs, looking lazy and unbothered, "Are you?"

"Jason," Jughead groans, annoyed.

"_Jughead,_" Jason sing-songs back, a little teasing note in his voice that rings up and down Jughead’s spine. It’s the first time he’s ever called Jughead by his name, and Jughead doesn’t know why but it makes him breathe a little faster.

Jughead clears his throat and looks at Jason closely. "Are you high?"

His hair is messier than it usually is, like he hadn’t bothered brushing it when he woke up this morning, and it’s longer than Jughead’s ever seen him keep it, almost as long as Archie’s hair used to be. Jughead can see his varsity jacket stuffed in the backseat, but currently he’s in a speckled black sweatshirt, something soft and cozy. He seems like a different version of the Jason that Jughead sees around school or Pop’s, like someone cracked his outer shell and found the real, raw boy inside of him. He must be high.

"Yeah, maybe," Jason replies, shrugging again, like he can’t help it all. "Do you want to be?"

Jughead should say no. He should. And he really is going to, because the idea scares him and it’s not like he really wants to and Jason just straight up admitted to selling drugs, anyway, but Jason’s looking at him like he might be the most important person in the world, his eyes big and focused only on Jughead, and it reignites a flame inside Jughead’s chest that had gone to bed the same day Archie died — a flame of, _ This person wants to listen to me and take care of me. _

Even though it’s not the same — Archie had defended him against bullies, offered him a place to sleep at night when he didn’t want to go home, always bought him extra candy at the movie theatre when he knew Jughead was having a bad day or week or month, and Jason’s version of taking care of Jughead is offering him illegal substances and then giving him the most bare minimum of attention — Jughead suddenly craves it so badly that he thinks he’d kill himself if he doesn’t get it right now, kill himself if Jason stops looking at him, kill himself is he says _ no _and Jason drives away and he’s left all alone in this stupid, empty drive-in theatre.

So he says, "Yeah," immediately knowing he’s going to regret it, and Jason grins, eyes half-lidded but bright.

They end up back in the projection booth, having shared a joint in Jason’s car that was probably a little too much for Jughead, who got so high it hit him like a wave of molasses and decided he needed to lay in his bed or he was going to freak out.

Jughead now lays still on top of the scratchy sheets of his cot, his eyes following Jason around the room as Jason checks out the details of his shabby set up.

Jason hadn’t said anything when Jughead had unlocked the door and his eyes fell on the unmade cot, the campfire stove, the backpacks of empty chip bags and beef jerky, the piles of Jughead’s dirty clothes that he has yet to wash. He’d just guided Jughead to the bed, got him some water, and then started looking around.

Jughead’s afraid to know what Jason thinks about all of it, but he’s also a bit too high to care. His brain feels like jelly, like it’s falling out of his head, and his body feels so relaxed he thinks he’s actually going to melt. Like, he keeps focusing really hard on being a solid person because he’s so convinced he’s going to become liquid. He really should never smoke weed again.

"Were you being serious," Jughead speaks from his position on the bed, his words all mismatched and funny sounding because of his sudden cotton mouth, "about the drugs. About the coke."

Jason turns back to him and tilts his head, amused. "Why would I lie?"

"Because I was being mean and teasing you." Jughead swallows. God, he wishes his mouth would work like normal again. "Because it could be a funny joke."

Jason just shakes his head like something is funny and turns his attention back around to the film tapes he was admiring on the projection table. He seems to know not to touch them, but he looks at them in awe like he’s never seen something so old, which is ironic for a boy who lives in a place like Thornhill. He leans down close to the rolls of film, his eyes scanning them like he might be able to absorb the stills from osmosis.

"Do you like it here?" Jason asks suddenly, straightening up to look around the entire room.

Jughead gives a one shouldered shrug. "It makes do." 

"Did you drink that water I got you?" Jason asks, switching conversation topics like he wasn’t really waiting to hear Jughead’s answer.

Jughead frowns and looks toward the ground where the half empty water bottle sits. He reaches down for it, but it feels like it takes him years to do. His struggle with unscrewing the cap is a whole other ordeal, and after finally drinking the whole thing, he’s so exhausted he could just fall asleep right then and there. He almost does, if it were not for the sudden weight on his bed that makes his eyes shoot open.

Jason’s situated himself at the foot end of Jughead’s cot, his back up against the wall and his arms hooked around his legs, holding them loosely to his chest. Jughead is frustrated at how un-high Jason seems. He probably looks so stupidly inebriated in front of Jason, but he also doesn’t think it’s a good sign that Jason probably gets high so often that it’s not hard for him to still function like a normal person.

Jughead turns around on the bed to lay on his other side. It gives him a better view of Jason. "You need to stop selling drugs at my work. Selling drugs is bad." The smoke has made his voice a little gravelly.

Jason snorts. "So I’ve heard," he says, his voice teasing and silky smooth. Jughead wants to move his leg closer to Jason’s shin, touch him, feel his warmth through his jeans.

"You know, my dad sells drugs." Jughead’s nose scrunches up in thought. "I think. I don’t know. He doesn’t really give me the specifics and I don’t ask, but I think — I think he does. And _he’s_ a shithead. But it's okay because I haven’t seen him in a while, anyway."

Jason hums, saying nothing. Jughead thinks, _ fuck it, _and unsubtly moves his leg until it brushes Jason’s. The human contact is nice; Jughead can’t think of the last time he just casually touched somebody and let it linger like this since Archie. He and Betty share quick hugs and hold hands sometimes, but that's mostly in the context of comforting one another over a sudden burst of sadness about their dead best friend, and that’s about the extent of his relationship with touch these days. Archie had always just let Jughead clutch onto him like a vine, unbothered.

"How are you feeling?" Jason asks.

Jughead feels too embarrassed to admit how weird he feels, but he also feels too weird to play it off that easily. "I feel a little bit like I’m dying, I think." 

Jason lets out a short laugh. Before Jughead realizes what’s happening, Jason leans over and ruffles his hair softly. "I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you to smoke. It was stupid."

"No, no," Jughead is saying adamantly, something fuzzy unfurling in his chest at the cozy tone of Jason’s voice, "it wasn’t stupid." And then he admits the dumbest thing in the world: "I like hanging out with you."

Something changes on Jason’s face then, something Jughead can’t quite follow in this state. The moment between them feels very soft: Jason’s hand that’s still near Jughead’s face, not quite moved away yet, Jughead staring up at him sleepily, one of his cheeks squished against the material of his cot, his whole body feeling heavy and weighed down.

That’s when Jason leans over him and kisses him, one hand brushing against Jughead’s jaw, the other still on the bed sheets, supporting his weight.

It’s not Jughead’s first kiss; his first kiss had been with Trula Twyst in the second grade on the school playground, during their wedding ceremony (Jughead can’t remember the context of it now, but he remembers that Archie had been the minister). It’s not even his first _ real _kiss either; Jughead had that with Ethel Muggs after a party in the seventh grade. They’d both been on the porch of Dilton Doiley’s house, the last two kids waiting for their parents to pick them up, when Ethel confessed to him that she’d never been kissed and Jughead had – albeit awkwardly and half stuttering – suggested that he could kiss her. Archie was so proud of Jughead when he told him the next day that he bought Jughead a popsicle with the money he’d made from mowing the Cooper’s lawn.

Beyond those two blips in time, Jughead has never kissed anyone. He’s never held hands with anyone down the street or in public, he’s never made out or hooked up with anyone – his experience is limited to a fine line of absolutely nothing – and he _ knows _that Jason has the opposite problem.

So when Jason leans over and kisses him, Jughead freaks out. The first few seconds feel like eons in his brain and his eyes stay open, unblinking but also unable to process the fact that they’re so near one another that he could could count Jason’s eyelashes this up close if he wanted to. 

He thinks, _ Oh my God. _ He thinks, _ Fuck. Shit. Oh fuck. _ He thinks, _ I wonder when the last time I brushed my teeth was. _ He thinks, _ Jason Blossom is the hottest boy in town and he’s kissing _ ** _me _ ** _ and I want him to kiss me more than I want anything else in the world. _

So he slips his eyes closed, letting himself fall into the thrumming feeling all about his body that might be from the kiss or might be from the weed, and he kisses Jason back.

It’s a short goodbye. Jason putting his sweatshirt back on, his torso stretching tall to do so and revealing the plain of his stomach for a brief second before he tugs the fabric back down, Jughead saying goodbye to him in the archway of the door, his fingers continually brushing over the spot on his neck where he knows Jason left a hickey. Jughead feels like he’s in a half-finished dream, his high having mixed with the sensation of sex to create a weird, sleepy state, the buzzing and blinking of the light hung over the outside of his door casting a certain unreality to everything he’s seeing. 

Jason kisses him goodbye, much to Jughead’s surprise, gently pushing him against the molding of the doorway and cradling Jughead’s cheeks in his hands. There are questions Jughead should probably be asking right now, questions about Polly, questions about what this means, questions of _ why? _ and _ what? _ and _ how?, _but his brain feels zapped and dusty as he watches Jason walk away to his car, still the only car left in the dirt lot, and he turns back around to go inside his room.

It’s easier to freak out about the uncertainty and vagueness of it all when he wakes up the next morning, but then halfway through the day he gets the text, _ Forgot to tell you: got an A on that essay btw. Guess I owe you another burger, _and the relief he feels is palpable.

There’s also a good amount of guilt swirling about his body, clogging up his lungs and choking his throat, but he can’t figure out a source of it or a way to shed it, so he just shoulders it. Packs it away in a box that says _ for later. _

Ever since Veronica stood up for Betty and him that day in the hallway things have steadily returned almost back to normal between the three of them. Almost. 

Their weekly trips to Pop’s resumed easily, except now Betty never sat on the same side of the booth as Veronica, instead always secured by Jughead’s side. They both agree go to the Friday football games to watch Veronica cheer, except now something always comes up with Betty at the last second and she can’t make it. Jughead is left to whoop and holler for Veronica alone, the cold seeping through his thin jacket easily and getting down to his bones, trying not to let his eyes stray to the field and search for red hair. 

They still sit under the bleachers during lunch (Sometimes Veronica sits with them now, most of the time she doesn’t. Jughead can’t figure out which one Betty prefers.) and Betty talks to them about her parents, who have been on an unusually nice streak since Archie died, one that Jughead is sure isn't going to last.

"Mom and Dad said I can talk to Polly on the phone this weekend," Betty tells them, her eyes impossibly hopeful.

Jughead bites the inside of his cheek.

"That’s so great, B!" Veronica says cheerfully. She’s been slowly chewing through a packet of Cheetos the entire lunch, and Jughead wonders if she’d forgotten to bring anything else to eat.

Betty frowns oddly and looks away from Veronica to direct her attention to Jughead. She does this often, like she suddenly gets uncomfortable with Veronica’s well-intended advances at friendship. "I’d like to see her. I miss her a lot." Betty says, mostly to Jughead.

"Maybe you’ll get to go and visit her soon." Veronica offers.

But Betty won't look her way, barely refuses to acknowledge her existence. Betty keeps her eyes firmly near Jughead, looking past him for a moment before she retrains her focus on his face and says, "Mom and Dad won't tell me when she'll get to come home," as though Jughead had said something in response to her and not Veronica.

Jughead watches as Veronica subtly deflates in the corner, her shoulders sagging and her face falling. She does this often, too, in response to Betty: the performance she had been putting on hadn’t been good enough, so she scraps it altogether.

Jughead shrugs uncomfortably, suddenly feeling the pressure of this conversation he's being roped into. "Maybe they don’t know," he suggests. 

"They’re the ones who put her in there, they can take her out. They say she’s still ‘recovering from the breakup,’ but how long does it really take to get over a relationship?" Betty scoffs. "I think Jason is a shitty person and an even shittier boyfriend, but Mom was the one who drove Polly crazy about it all and caused her to fall apart. She’s been in that place for _months_ now. Wouldn’t it be better for her to heal back home?" 

Jughead can’t help but glance at Betty’s palms, the dark red scabs that he knows will be broken into by next week probably, and thinks,_ Well, not much healing goes on around here. _

"Love is a bitch," Veronica replies surly, crunching on the last Cheeto from the bag. "Your mom's right. Polly's probably still in pieces about it all."

With a roll of her eyes, Betty finally looks at Veronica just to scoff at her. "What would you know about love? We’re fifteen. I doubt whatever two week stint you had with one of your boy toys back in the big city makes you the expert in this situation."

"Oh, but you are?" Veronica raises her eyebrows in slick judgement. "Sorry, but from what I know, it sounds like your sister and Jason had a _real_ healthy relationship there, Betts. And a relationship goes both ways. Maybe Polly did something to upset Jason. Maybe that's why they're keeping her in there." Veronica shrugs in a what-can-you-do type of manner.

Betty looks like she's two seconds away from strangling Veronica. She spits out, "What would you know about my sister?"

"All I'm saying is that maybe there's more to the story than you know." Veronica replies innocently, so innocently it lets her rage leak through. "You talk about your sister like she's a saint, but if she dated someone who's as bad as you say Jason Blossom is, maybe she's bad too." 

Betty scowls. "Veronica, shut up. _You_ should know, of all people, how the football team is, how they're assholes who love to play with girls and break their hearts –"

"And _I _should know, of all people, how bitchy and crazy every Vixen is. Wasn’t your sister a Vixen, Betty?"

It’s not an uncommon occurrence for Betty and Veronica to go at it in their passive aggressive manner, especially after whatever happened that night at Homecoming, but usually their arguments are about something stupid like Veronica and Betty disagreeing about some character on those shows they like or Veronica accidentally insulting Betty's fashion taste, and those arguments dissolve easily on their own. It’s never been this this close to home before.

Jughead clears his throat. "Guys –"

"No wonder you made the team, then." Betty says venomously to Veronica, leaning ever-so slightly forward toward Veronica, like the cruelty of her words is tipping her, "You fit the mold so fucking well."

Veronica lets out a little high pitched laugh and shakes her head in disbelief. "Well,"Veronica drawls as she rushes to her feet, grabbing her bag and brushing the grass off of her cheer uniform, "Guess I better get back to my fellow crazy bitches then, huh!" She stalks off without another word, her pleated skirt twirling roughly with the fast movement of her legs.

Jughead and Betty sit in sour silence for a moment. Jughead looks sidelong at Betty. Her hands are curled into themselves (_By next week_ had been such a naive estimate.) and he reaches out to unfurl them; Betty lets him.

After Jughead's blotted some of the blood away from her skin with a nearby napkin, he tells her plainly, "You guys can’t do that."

"Do what?" Betty huffs loudly, her spine rigid and tense.

"Crucify each other," Jughead says, still looking down at Betty’s palms and trying resolutely to minimize the wounds without hurting Betty even more with the scratchy lunchroom napkin, "You reprimand her for every little thing she says."

"Well, she says a lot of shit –"

"So do you! Veronica only responds so meanly because, for some reason, you like to pretend she doesn't exist when she talks to you, because you like to _ignore _her," Jughead argues, lifting his head up to look Betty in the eyes. "Do you like her or do you hate her?"

"What?" Betty asks, her face crumbling into helpless confusion like she's lost the plot on how this conversation even got here. 

"Because I can’t tell, and I don’t think Veronica can either, and she really likes you, you know –"

"What about you?" Betty cuts him off, frenzied. "Do you like me or do you hate me?"

Now it’s Jughead’s turn to let a out a, "...What?" But his comes out quieter than Betty’s had.

"Why do you always take her side?" Betty asks suddenly, her eyes full of tears, her bloody hands squeezing into themselves again, "Why do you always defend her? Even when she says _awful_ things about Archie, even when she says _awful_ things about me –"

"Betty, she doesn’t mean –"

"She _does_ sometimes, Jug. She does." Betty frowns and swallows, tears running down her face until they drop off her cheeks and land where both of their hands are still tangled together, red palms and a red stained napkin. "I don’t – Archie’s not here anymore and – you’re the one who’s supposed to be standing up for _me,_not her, some girl we didn’t even know until two months ago. You’re not supposed to like her more than me." 

"Betty," he chokes out, "I don’t like her more than you."

Betty just shakes her head, her curls bouncing along, and says thickly, "She’s not going to fill in for Archie no matter how much you want her to."

He tenses up immediately. "That is _not_ why I’m friends with her."

"Isn’t it?" Betty asks, looking at him with so much frustration. "Archie died and you didn’t want anything to do with him – didn’t want to talk about him, didn’t want to see pictures of him, didn’t want to remember him. You were so happy to forget about him that when Veronica came around, you led her into our little group like you would have picked just about _anyone_ as long as they were willing to slot into the empty space between us that Archie left."

"I _did_ want to talk about him. I do talk about him." Jughead thinks he might pass out, he can’t catch his breath and every inhale gets shallower and shallower. "I – Veronica’s just another friend. We can’t have new friends because our other friend is dead? How could you say I’m trying to replace him like – like anyone could – like I _want_ that –"

"I don’t think you know what you want." Betty tells him through a hiccuping sob, blinking the rest of the tears from her eyes. 

The school bell rings, mechanically sounding out between the two of them. Betty pulls her hands away from his grasp and stands up stiffly, wiping her nose with her sleeve and sniffling. Her sweater has little cherries on it and the red of them match the gummy blood on her hands. 

"I wish, more than anything, that it could all go back to the way it was," she tells him desperately, almost like she’s partly pleading to God for the words to come true as she speaks them, "But it can’t and it won’t. And I’m done trying to play pretend for you."

She turns and walks away just like Veronica had, and Jughead is left sitting on the ground, his jeans stained green from the grass and his chest full of an unbearable weight that speaks to him in chants of guilt and grief and death.

Jughead exists in isolation for the next two days; unable to talk to Betty and too unstable to reach out to Veronica. He goes to school, barely pays attention to classes, holes up in the library alone for lunch, and then goes straight home to the drive-in. The owner reminds him that he doesn’t have the money to pay him overtime, but Jughead just shrugs and plays the tapes anyway. He has nowhere else to go, too afraid to go to Pop’s in fear of seeing Veronica or Betty or someone else he knows. All he has is in this projection booth.

He’s always been good at wallowing in his misery, but this time he finds it exhausts him. He makes it until the night of day two before he cracks; he can only ignore his schoolwork for so long and stare blankly at whatever film he’s supposed to be showing until his brain rots in his head.

As the end of _ Hocus Pocus _ plays, his phone buzzes in the dark room, lighting up through the fabric of his pants pocket. When Jughead goes to check it, he finds it’s just another message from Fred (_Hey bud , Just wanted to see how you were doing ? Call me when you can .) _and swallows the disappointment down that it’s not Betty or Veronica calling to tell him they’ve worked it out between each other and miss him very much. If only anything were ever that easy.

It does give him an idea though. He taps into his message inbox and scrolls until he finds the conversation he’s looking for.

Thirty minutes later, he opens the door to Jason holding up a paper take-out bag with grease spotting through the bottom, the Chock’lit Shop logo proudly stamped on the front.

"I don’t pussy out of promises, Jones," is what Jason says in response when Jughead raises his eyebrows excitedly at the food.

Jughead doesn’t even try to bite down his smile this time.

They eat the burgers and fries Jason brought and share the milkshake. Jughead shows Jason how to work the projector per his request. He teaches Jason how to carefully handle the rolls of film and how to load them in, playing a few moments of the movie before shutting it off. When Jason asks if they can watch something on it since the last scheduled showing of the theatre is over, Jughead bites his tongue and thinks of how bad of an idea that is. People could easily see that a movie was playing from the interstate, and if one of those people happened to be the owner, who sometimes drops by at the end of random nights to check the register or service something, Jughead would be fucked. He could definitely be fired, and if he was fired, he would have no place to live.

And yet – as he tends to do when Jason asks him something – he shrugs, thinks _ fuck it, _ and says, "Sure, what do you want to see?"

In the spirit of Halloween, Jason chooses some Polish horror film that Jughead’s actually been wanting to watch for a while. He doesn’t even get to watch it this time, though, because twenty minutes in Jason drags him into the backseat of the Cadillac and kisses him, biting his lips so hard it draws blood.

The weight of Jason on top of him makes him feel good, better than he’s felt in a long time. Jason easily pushes his body down onto the plush seats of the car with pressure focused on his hips, and he digs his nails into the soft skin at Jughead's shoulders like he's trying to get down to the bone. This whole thing that they do, the way Jason kisses him almost like he wants to destroy him, it makes Jughead feel a little bit powerful, and that's why he does it, he thinks. For that golden feeling that fills his chest right as Jason moves toward him, his eyes lidded with things Jughead had never fully understood before, like want and desire. It makes him feel powerful. 

Later in life, when looking back on the memory, the word he might use instead is _ loved._

Jason sleeps over as though without meaning to. He smokes after the movie’s finished, Jughead not partaking, and then when he asks for water Jughead takes him back to the booth and they end up staying there. Jason kisses him again and Jughead kisses back, and then Jason’s taking off his shirt and Jughead is tipping his head back and closing his eyes and, well, you can guess the rest. 

They both accidentally fall asleep on the cot afterward, limbs tangled and gross, hair mussed up in every which way, and Jughead’s neck and chest bitten purple and red as a byproduct of Jason’s mouth.

Jughead wakes up in the middle of the night to grab a sweatshirt or at least something to protect him from the early winter cold that’s starting to seep into his room at night. It’s only after he’s tugged one over his head and slipped back under the blanket does he realize that Jason had woken up at some point in the night to do the same thing, except what he’d found to wrap around himself was the old flannel of Archie's that Jughead never put away.

At the sight of it on Jason, Jughead’s mouth goes dry. Sleep disappears from his limbs. His eyes trace the pattern of the flannel up and down Jason’s arm and then up to his face, where he’s dozing easily, looking so young in his sleep that is startles Jughead.

Jughead lays awake for an hour, his thoughts humming and buzzing around in his brain, but unable to be deciphered as anything more than static, until Jason shifts and mumbles in his sleep, instinctively reaching his strong arms around Jughead and pressing his face into Jughead’s neck.

He’s warm, so warm in contrast to the cold air around them, and suddenly Jughead smells Archie on Jason – the sickly sweet smell of Jason’s cologne mixing in with the distinct scent of Archie – and he has to turn his face away and hold his breath so he doesn’t retch.

He falls asleep eventually, but it’s less of a gentle ease into rest and more like one moment he’s awake and then one moment he’s awake again with an implication that time passed somewhere in the middle, the memories in between stolen by someone else. He stirs to the sound of rustling, blearily blinking his eyes open to see Jason standing above him, fumbling to put his pants on. It must be early because the sun barely shines through the small window that the projector sticks out of.

Jughead's tired eyes follow Jason around the room as he grabs his things – the water bottle on Jughead’s desk that he used last night, the trash that remains from their Pop’s binge, his varsity jacket, his backpack – and Jughead watches the strong line of Jason’s shoulders, noting the way Archie’s flannel seems to fit him perfectly there. Through the desperation of his sleep-addled brain, Jughead ignores the small differences, like how Jason’s red hair curls a little bit at the nape of his neck or the way his silhouette slims easily at his torso and down to his hips, and for a moment – like it’s his last hope at sanity – Jughead pretends it’s Archie stumbling about his room instead.

He falls back asleep easily to the thought, and it’s only when he wakes up later in the day and realizes the flannel is nowhere to be found, that Jason must have forgotten to take it off before he left, does he remember his daydream of the morning.

Jughead feels inexplicably dirty for the rest of the day, like he’s done something so sinful he’ll never be able to fully come back from it.

He doesn’t go to school that Monday, partially because he sleeps through his alarm and wakes up at half past twelve, too late to try and make it anymore, and partially because he’s back to being content in his misery. He’d had the social contact he’d so desperately wanted and it had ended up being more than enough for Jughead to swallow. 

But by three thirty in the afternoon someone is knocking at his door, waking Jughead up from his second extended nap of the day. When he shuffles up to open it, he finds Veronica waiting nervously behind it. She’s in her Vixens uniform again, the only thing she seems to wear anymore, just like Jason wears that stupid letterman, the whole lot of them like a cast of cartoon characters who have only one outfit in their wardrobe.

It's only at the sight of her face that Jughead realizes that he’s extremely missed her since he'd last seen her. He smiles at her, a little goofy and sleepy, and goes to hug her before she can even wave hello.

"Oh," she says into his shoulder, sounding just as surprised as Jughead is at his own action of affection, "Nice to see you too, I guess," and she hugs him back.

He invites her in without thinking about it. He only pauses to turn around and when he’s near his cot and suddenly realizes he can’t feel her presence behind him. 

Veronica’s standing just inside the doorway, her large eyes surveying the place with curiosity and fear. "Jughead – do you _live_ here?" She looks up at him, her face set in horror. When he doesn’t answer, she continues, "I – you haven’t been at Pop’s lately and I thought, well, the only other place I know he might be is the Twilight Drive-In, but I didn’t think –"

She cuts herself short, seemingly out of words. He’s only been to Veronica’s place of residence once or twice – the esteemed Pembrooke – but even if he hadn't he would know she comes from money. He can’t figure out if she’s horrified by his poverty or horrified by his filth.

Jughead shrugs, trying to play it off as cool as he can. "It’s not that big of a deal," he says, and before Veronica can start with how she certainly thinks it is that big of a deal, he interrupts her, "Not that many people know. I’m not supposed to be living here." He pauses for a moment. "Betty doesn’t know."

Veronica nods slowly, her eyes full of pity that Jughead looks away from. He should have never let her in. They should have gone somewhere else.

There’s a small stack of papers in her hands that he only notices when she extends them out to him. "We got our essays back in class, thought you might want yours. That’s why I came by..."

"Oh, uh," he says, scratching his head, and then taking the papers from her. There’s red on the top of the crisp white sheet – _ Please come see me after school to talk about this assignment. – _ and no letter grade. Jughead sighs and tosses it on his desk table, already knowing that he won’t follow through on it. "Thanks."

Veronica looks around the room cautiously. "Can I sit?"

"Oh, um," he pulls out the desk chair for her, "Here."

Veronica goes to sit as he makes his bed, trying to make it look a little more presentable. He sits on it after, the cot creaking under his weight. He wonders how the thing didn’t give out under his and Jason’s combined weight, and then shakes the thoughts of Jason away.

When he turns back to look up at Veronica, he finds her distracted by the picture of him, Archie, and Betty as kids that he’d nicked from Archie’s room and kept on his desk ever since. He leans over to watch her wipe some of the dust on the glass away and admire it.

"You would have liked him," Jughead says absently, watching Veronica turn the old photograph around in her hands, and then darting his eyes down to Archie’s smiling face. 

"Archie?" Veronica asks. It’s weird to hear her say his name.

"Yeah. He was so easy to get along with. I think he would have thought you were funny." He would have certainly thought she was a breath of fresh air in their little boring town.

He expects Veronica to be looking at the photograph along with him, but when he looks up, her eyes are trained on his face instead, and her expression is set with something like sadness, like she’s just solved a mystery he wasn’t even clued into.

"What?" He asks abruptly, embarrassed at the _ knowing _that’s so plainly written on her face for some reason.

"Nothing," she says softly, shaking her head like she can’t help it, "It’s nothing." And then she looks down at the picture in her hands again and smiles. He watches as her fingers slide over each of their childish faces: first Archie’s, his gap-toothed grin and his freckles, then Jughead, a little runt in the middle of the photo, and finally Betty, who's in a small floral sundress with her blonde hair tied up in a pink ribbon.

Veronica stares at the photo for a beat too long, her thumb framing Betty’s young face, and then she blinks like she's been shocked back into the present and puts it back on Jughead’s desk.

"I think I would have liked all of you as kids," she says, giving him one of those fake smiles of hers, the kind that always hides what she’s really feeling.

The clock in the corner of the room ticks rhythmically, puncturing their dusty silence with a beat. Veronica looks so out of place in this dark little room with her blue and yellow outfit, a silky bow stuck in her hair.

"She’s mad at me too." Jughead says into the quiet. "Betty."

Veronica stares out of the little projection window instead of meeting his gaze as he says this.

"Yeah, but she'll forgive you without a doubt." Veronica swallows. "I think I really fucked it up, this thing with Betty._"_

"No, you – you didn’t," Jughead says. He grapples with other words to comfort her, but every time he thinks of something, it dances away from him in his brain. Everything he can think of sounds wrong.

Veronica just laughs sadly and buries her face in her hands for a moment. "It’s so dumb. You know, she probably always hated me, but when we met that first day she toured me around school, something about her made my stomach twirl." Veronica uncovers her face and leans back in his chair, her stare carefully blank. "I always tried so hard to impress her, but I think it just made her hate me more."

He shakes his head, and he almost wants to put a hand on her knee or reach out to touch her, just to comfort her, but he doesn't. "She didn’t hate you." Then he tells her softly, "I think she just wanted to."

Veronica’s lips wobble. She bites them red to keep anything from spilling out. "Yeah," she whispers, her eyes turning glassy.

"What happened that night at Cheryl’s, anyway?"

Veronica smiles sadly, still not looking at him. "I kissed her."

Jughead lets out an, "Oh," even though it’s what he figured.

"Yeah," Veronica whispers. "But that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is that she kissed me back."

"...Oh_._"

"I don’t know if I hate her more for running away or if I hate myself more for not grabbing her and asking her to stay."

He picks at a thread from his pants. "Do you think she would have?" Jughead asks, and Veronica finally turns to look at him. "Stayed, I mean."

She gives a halfhearted shrug. Tendrils of her hair, silky and black, fall away from her shoulder and she looks at Jughead with her big, brown eyes. She’s beautiful, there’s no doubt in his mind about it, and she looks like the perfectly cast popular girl out of a high school movie, the kind of girl Betty always secretly wanted to be like when they were kids. He wonders if Betty had ever tangled some of her desire to be _ like _ Veronica with her desire _ of _Veronica, and if that’s partly why they are where they are now. 

Veronica smiles at him, but it doesn’t even try to reach her eyes. "It doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?"

She stays with Jughead a little while longer, even though neither of them explicitly vocalize that they want the company. Instead it echoes throughout the easiness of their conversations, the excitement Veronica has in telling Jughead about this week's ridiculous River Vixen drama, the patience and intensity she has while watching him explain the plot of the 30s noir drama he's currently reading. 

His stomach starts to grumble around five, so he boils water in the cheap kettle he collected a couple weeks ago and gets out two instant noodle packets to make some semblance of a dinner for them.

"Oh," Veronica says as she watches him start to rip them open, "I'm alright, thanks. I'm not really hungry."

Jughead frowns, suddenly feeling embarrassed. Of course Veronica doesn't want to eat stupid Top Ramen, Smithers probably makes her, like, _filet mignon_ once a week for dinner or something.

"Well, we should go get Pop’s later, when you do get hungry." Jughead tells her, shelving the other noodle packet away. "It stays open pretty late and you know me, always down to eat."

"Yeah, sure," Veronica agrees, smiling up at him sweetly at the suggestion.

They don’t go get Pop’s later, and Jughead forgets about it.

The next time he sees Jason is the morning that he decides to finally bite the bullet and go over to the Andrews’ house fir dinner that night with Mary and Fred.

At noon, he asks Jason if he can hang out – because apparently that’s something they do now – desperately needing a distraction from the oncoming nerves of dinner tonight that attack him right as he wakes up.

Jason brings him Hostess cupcakes and other various trashy food from the gas station, things that light up Jughead’s heart and stomach. They watch movies on Jughead’s half broken laptop but mostly kiss, Jason smokes like he always does and Jughead joins in this time, easily mesmerized by the way the smoke swirls and twirls up to make twisted shapes in the air.

At around three, Jason’s phone dings. He stops paying attention to Jughead completely to answer it and it busies him for a while until he says, "Hey, I gotta go do something. I’ll be back in a little bit."

Jughead, who is still feeling a little hazy and only wants to wrap his arms around Jason and sink into the bed but would go anywhere with Jason if it meant he didn’t have to be alone, asks, "Can I come along?"

Jason looks down at him for a moment, his face screwed up in thought. Then it all falls away and he shrugs. "Yeah, whatever."

They drive into the trees, out toward nothing, and time loses any sort of linear passing to Jughead as they burrow deeper and deeper into the forests of the countryside. Winter turns the grass soggy and dark, but the pines are as green as ever, offering Jughead a specific kind of crisp, cold air when he rolls the window down and sticks his face out.

Jason laughs at him from the driver’s seat. "You look like a dog." The expression on his face as he looks over at Jughead is almost fond.

Jughead just grins and sticks his tongue out for the full effect, the wind messing his hair up like crazy and pushing it into his eyes. Jason swerves the car into the empty lane on the other side of the road, causing Jughead to roughly tumble back into his seat and get choked by the seat belt. 

Laughter peels out of Jason, the happiest Jughead’s ever seen him, and Jughead can’t help but grin as he pushes and shoves at him in the driver’s seat, wheezing through the words, "You asshole, you asshole, you little asshole." His heart feels like it’s on fire.

They roll into a gravelly parking lot at an isolated travel station about forty minutes into the drive, and it’s at that moment Jughead realizes he hadn’t even bothered to ask where they were meaning to go,

Before he can pester, Jason’s already halfway out the car and saying, "Stay put." The driver door slams harshly behind him.

Jughead watches in the reflection of the rear view mirror as Jason meets a burly man in the middle of the parking lot. He’s carrying a bag in his hands that Jughead hadn’t noticed he had in his possession. When Jason passes the bag over to the guy and the guy hands him back a wad of cash, Jughead’s brain finally catches up with his eyes and he realizes he’s watching Jason Blossom complete a fucking drug deal. Like, a _real_ drug deal, not just something with a small bag of weed and two stupid teenagers like before.

The guy checks the contents of the bag, gives Jason a gruff nod, says a sentence or two and waits for Jason’s reply, and then turns to go back to his motorcycle, the back of his jacket proudly flashing the Ghoulies logo, a logo Jughead wishes he didn’t know all too well.

Jason ducks back into the car and when he doesn’t immediately say something, Jughead asks, "What was that?" He feels sick to his stomach.

Jason shrugs, reaching over toward Jughead to open the glove box so he can store the green wad of cash in there. The compartment opens and reveals to Jughead more stacks of money, all piled up on top of one another. "Just an errand for a friend. Don’t worry about it." Jughead’s posture is rigid and stern. Jason looks at him, an eyebrow raised in judgement at the way he’s acting. "I’m serious, Jughead. Don’t worry about it." He slams the glove box closed.

He sits very still as Jason turns the engine on, peeling out easily from the parking lot and heading back down the way they came. He sits still as Jason puts the radio on and adjusts it for a while, trying to find whatever station or song he’s looking for. He even stays quiet as Jason, one hand still on the wheel, produces a little cigarette carton from a compartment in the center his dashboard and takes out a joint from inside, handing it to Jughead along with a lighter.

Jughead holds the items in his hands and suddenly he has a moment like he had all those weeks ago on the balcony of Thornhill, wondering why he’s even here in this car with Jason Blossom after watching him fucking sell _ drugs_, Jesus Christ, wondering what kind of business someone like Jason even _ has _with the Ghoulies, wondering why he himself does drugs now apparently, why that’s now a part of his life. 

"C’mon," Jason says, sparing a quick glance away from the road and at Jughead, "Light it."

"Uh," Jughead drawls, his brain still slowly processing everything he’s thinking and feeling, "I don’t know if – shouldn’t we just wait until we get back?"

Jason’s mouth settles into a straight line and he does a little shrug, a tick of his that Jughead's come to learn means he’s upset in some way. "I’m coming down from my high, but whatever."

Jughead wants to say, _ You actually get high? You act the exact same all of the time, _and then he starts wondering if Jason is just never sober in some way or another and just knows how to act normal. He then gets freaked out thinking about the fact that Jason’s driving not that long after they’d smoked and Jughead had so willingly gotten into his car without a second thought.

"It’s just – you shouldn’t be driving while high."

Jason shrugs. "I do it all the time. It’s fine, I’m not stupid."

"Yeah, but it’s just not… good."

Jason rolls his eyes and Jughead suddenly wants to be anywhere but here. "Come on, I’ll pull over then."

"No, that’s not what I really –"

But Jason’s taking the next exit off the highway and driving up a small, windy country road until it leads to a clearing at the top of a green hill. He seems satisfied at himself for finding such a perfect spot as he rolls the windows up and turns the engine off.

Jughead looks out at the electric green rolling hills in front of them as Jason lights up the joint beside him, the familiar smell of weed hitting his nose as Jason exhales smoke, and Jughead wants out, out, out. Out of this car, out of this life he’s fallen into, out of this body.

Jughead smokes with him, hoping that maybe it’ll numb him enough to stop freaking out, to stop thinking altogether. He’d welcome a silent brain with the most open arms. He just wants to go home and sleep for days without ever waking up. He just wants to feel nothing ever again.

The Smiths are playing on the radio, Morrissey crooning about partying and dying. His dad used to have this album on vinyl, Jughead remembers. He wonders where that record collection is now.

Jason turns the song down just a tad, and then leans back in his seat. "It’s beautiful out here," he says, the joint burning out in between his fingers, his eyes trained out of the windshield.

"Yeah." Jughead replies blankly.

Jason looks out at the distant treeline as the sun starts to sink – reminding Jughead suddenly that he has to be back soon to see Fred and Mary – and he tells Jughead, "You know, we could leave town. Do you ever think about that?" Jason looks almost sad as his eyes study the landscape full of nothing but rolling hills and the highway with its occasional car. He breathes out, "We could just go."

Jughead takes in a dizzying breath, and then he nearly throws up.

Jason drops him off at the Andrews’ without complaint. They’d barely spoken another word to each other the whole ride home, painful tension in the atmosphere between them that Jughead couldn’t figure out if he was projecting or if Jason was actually feeling it too.

Jason leaves him on the sidewalk, driving off down the road with a half-assed wave out the window. Jughead stands out in the cold for a moment – probably more than that, but his brain and time stopped working cohesively together about two hours ago – and then he carefully empties out all of the thoughts in his head, draining his body of emotions.

The front door’s open when he walks up to it, so he enters unannounced, taking his shoes off by the entrance like he’s learned to do over the years. There’s a delicious smell coming from the kitchen and the sound of laughter. 

Jughead clears his throat. "Hello?" He calls out into the open house. His voice sounds wrong to his own ears.

Dishes cling and clack together from the kitchen. Someone’s shuffling their feet on the tiles. Someone else is sliding a drawer open.

"Hey Jug!" Fred calls amicably from the archway of the kitchen. He seems busy, a metal tray in his hands with a spiced and oily chicken on it. "We’re just finishing up the last of the food." He smiles, easy, warm, so inviting, everything like Archie, and Jughead blinks, tries to get the room to stop spinning. Fred’s gaze gets caught on something else on the other side of the kitchen. Someone’s saying something to him, he’s laughing, and then looking back at Jughead. "Oh hey, Jug, we invited Betty last minute. Can never have too many people or too much food, y'know?"

Betty comes into view then, walking tentatively to the open doorway from the other side of the kitchen. Her hair is in pretty waves, the kind of hairstyle she always does before school dances, and she has a modest pink button-up on, her cheeks graced with blush. She holds herself cautiously and looks toward him with her arms crossed over her chest. He wonders how big the scabs on her palms are this time.

When she meets Jughead’s eyes, she stops mid-motion to squint at him. Then she walks briskly forward, out of the kitchen, to meet him in the dark hallway. He stands there awkwardly, without speaking or moving, and when Betty gets close enough to him, he can see the way her face is all screwed up but he can’t tell why.

"Are you _high_?" Betty whispers to him incredulously, sounding like something out of an old D.A.R.E. VHS tape they run at the after school teen church group. She pinches the fabric of his shirt and brings it up to her nose. She repels immediately, pushing him back with a little force. "You reek."

"Uh," Jughead drawls. He means to actually say something, but he’d emptied all the words he knew from the English language from his head back out in the front yard. 

Betty’s _pissed. _ Her eyes are wide in disbelief and they’re searching all over his face. "Jughead, what the fuck is your problem? Why did you show up to dinner with Archie’s parents on drugs?" She whisper-screams at him, "Where are you even _getting_ drugs?"

"It’s a – it’s a long story." His answer does not appease Betty.

"You look like trash," she tells him honestly, her eyes full of concern that don’t match the judgement clouding her voice.

"Everything alright in here, guys?" Mary asks with a simple smile, coming over to lean against the arch in the doorway with a wine glass in her hand. Jughead hasn’t seen her in awhile, but she looks just like he remembered: kind and fresh-faced, the same lipstick on that she's always worn, the one that reminds Jughead of cherry syrup. She waves at him. "Nice to see you, Jug."

Jughead’s too slow to respond to her, so Betty pipes up with, "Yes, everything's great!" and then he can see the gears in her head start turning as she says, "But I actually need to give Jughead something that I left in my room. Would you mind if we popped over to my house for a minute, Mary? We’ll be right back." Betty’s voice is high-pitched and theatrical, the way she always sounds when she’s talking to adults and trying to be polite.

Mary waves them away. "Oh, of course! Just be back in twenty, or I can’t guarantee that Fred and I won’t have eaten all the food." She winks at them, so teasing and motherly that it makes Jughead’s stomach ache.

Betty sneaks him up the stairs of her house without Alice seeing and shoves him into the bathroom, turning on the shower and telling him to strip down and get in as she leaves to find spare clothes in her wardrobe. She comes back in when Jughead’s already under the water, and she sits on the closed top of the toilet seat, waiting for him to be done like his mother used to do when he was sick as a kid and needed to shower to calm his feverish skin.

The cold water is painful at first, but it sobers him up more than he thought was possible. He’s only in there for about five minutes, mostly at Betty’s insistence from the toilet of,_ Now is not the time to rack up my water bill, Jughead, _but he feels suddenly refreshed and born again as he dunks his head under the stream of water one last time and rubs at his face, the temperature shocking his skin awake.

Betty covers her eyes as he steps out into a towel and finds his underwear. There’s a neatly folded stack of clothes waiting for him on the counter, and he realizes that they’re not her clothes when he examines them more: grey athleisure sweatpants and a big Riverdale High hoodie.

"Betty – whose are these?"

Betty removes her hand from her eyes to look at him. "Archie’s." She says as she gets up to take his discarded towel and starts aggressively drying his hair, shaking all the water droplets out. "Come on, we have to get back soon."

"I can’t. I can’t smell like him. I’ll go insane during dinner."

"They don’t smell like Archie anymore. I wear them too often." She looks away from him, almost embarrassed at the fact.

Jughead brings the fabric up to his face and is surprised to find it really doesn’t smell like Archie at all, only the scent of Betty’s pink bed sheets and a hint of that fancy perfume she wears. He wonders how often she must wear them in order to wash the smell out completely. 

Betty tries to help dress him at first, but he pushes her hands away gently. "I’m not completely immobile, Betts, just a little out of it."

She frowns, but doesn’t say anything else, leaning with her back against the bathroom counter, staring firmly at the spot where the wall meets the floor as Jughead gets dressed beside her, neither of them speaking.

Betty distracts her mom with idle conversation as Jughead slips out the front door and waits for her on the sidewalk. She joins him a few minutes later, a little more frazzled than she’d been when she’d left him at the foot of the stairs. She walks right past him without a word, wiping imaginary dust off her pants and re-tucking her shirt, heading back toward the sunny lights of the Andrews’ house.

Jughead follows her quickly. "Are you mad at me?" He sounds hopelessly childish as he asks, but suddenly can’t push down the feeling that he wants to burst into tears. It’s not like he doesn’t know the answer already; they haven’t talked since school last week, and how could she not be upset at him for the shit he’s pulled today?

Betty whirls around to face him. He expects her to yell at him, chew him out until there’s nothing left, but she just looks sad and small, shivering outside in the cold. 

"Jughead," she chokes out, already halfway to tears herself, "I just don’t understand what’s going on with you and it _scares_ me."

A cold breeze whips around the two of them. They should definitely go inside, their absence already ill-timed. If Mary or Fred were to look out the window and see them talking intensely on the sidewalk it would certainly raise concern.

"I’m sorry." It’s all he can say, but he knows it's not enough, his voice barely able to get the sentence out. Betty's eyes fall toward the cement, but before she can turn away and lead them both back inside, he reaches out and tugs her into a hug, wrapping his arms around her shoulders, pressing her strongly into his torso. "I’m sorry for everything." He repeats desperately and his voice cracks all over the words.

It takes a moment, but her arms eventually wrap themselves tightly around him and she buries her face in his shoulder. He can feel the way she grasps at the fabric on his back desperately, like there’s no way in the world they could be close enough.

"Everything just feels so broken all of the time," he whispers into the crook of her neck, "and I don’t know how to fix any of it."

"I know." She squeezes him tighter. It’s all she can do. "I know."

If Fred and Mary notice the change of outfit or the light dampness of Jughead’s hair, they don’t comment on it.

Fred makes a pork roast, the kind he’s always made for Thanksgiving, and Mary makes mashed potatoes that she makes with extra butter for Jughead's benefit_. _Betty’s brought along a baked casserole from her mother, the only dish they all politely eat and say, _Oh, wow, Betty this is wonderful, please tell Alice we say thank you, _but don’t go back in for seconds. Jughead, unable to contribute anything, offers his meek company and cleans the dishes for the four of them after dinner.

Much like everyone else in Riverdale, they don’t really talk about Archie. Mostly, they talk around him: he’s there in the sidelines of some of the stories and there are references to his death – Mary saying, _I’m so glad I got to see the two of you before I have to leave tomorrow, _getting choked up for a minute, and Fred talking about how he pulled a muscle when he and Mary were packing some stuff away yesterday, the cardboard boxes of clothes with the words “donation” scribbled across the front mocking them all from their place stacked on the stairs – but it’s still a good meal and a surprisingly good time. Jughead sits at his place at the table and feels stupid for worrying so much before about seeing these people he’s known his whole life and has found so much comfort in over the years.

After dinner, Fred turns on the lights he strung up outside a while ago, he and Mary open another bottle of wine, and Jughead and Betty sit on the porch together as they watch the two of them throw a ball for Vegas back and forth across the grass. Fred and Mary laugh together, getting distracted for a moment as they bend down to examine something in the soil at the bottom of the big tree in the backyard, and Vegas circles around them, looking to regain their attention.

Betty leans into Jughead’s side as they sit next to each other. Her warmth is a welcome feeling.

"I do like her."

Jughead blinks, caught off guard by Betty’s voice. He turns to look down at her. "What?"

Betty’s watching Vegas bark at Fred, watching Fred and Mary laugh back at him. "Veronica. I do like her." 

"I know." Jughead replies and his words make Betty shrink away. "I know that, but I don’t think she does."

Betty’s silent for a moment. "She found me during lunch and apologized. I said sorry too, obviously. We ate together and talked and, I don't know… it was good. Better than it is usually." Jughead’s too relieved at the news that they made up to focus on the fact that Betty’s silent again in between sentences. "She had all these bruises on her legs, though."

Jughead waits for the other shoe to drop, for Betty to say something else. He’d noticed the small, faded blue and black bruises that dotted Veronica’s legs on occasion, too, but he’d brushed them off when he realized they didn’t really look like bruises from being beat up or anything of the concerning sort. "Betts, I think they’re just from cheer._"_

"Yeah, but…" Betty bites her lip. "Don't you ever notice how little she eats?"

Jughead frowns; he hadn't, really. "She eats at Pop's all the time."

"Yeah, like half a pancake. When she orders two eggs she eats both of them, but that's just two eggs." Betty gestures frantically. "You can't survive on _just_ two eggs."

"Well, we don't know what she eats the rest of the day. I mean, it's not like she's bone skinny, you know?" Jughead says, shrugging, "So I think she must be fine." Something in him is saying, _We would know if there was something wrong. We would know, _but he can't bring himself to say it out loud, because some sort of doubt has sprouted in his head.

"Jughead, I don’t know. I’m just – I’m just worried about her." Betty looks so uneasy, thinking about all of it. She looks up at him. "I’m really worried about both of you."

He shakes his head. "You don’t have to worry about me," he tells her, but there’s a part of him that doubts that, too.

"Jughead?" Betty asks after a moment, her voice curious and careful, "Where did you get the drugs, like, really?"

Admitting it was Jason would be a recipe for disaster, and it would make him have to explain the past few months, everything that’s been going on since Jason approached him the day of Archie’s funeral. He doesn’t even know how he’d justify any of it, especially to Betty. After all this time, he still doesn’t really have the words for it or know why it’s happening, he just knows that it’s nice to not be alone all of the time.

"It’s nothing, Betts," she stares at him unhappily and he bumps their shoulders together, teasing for anything but a frown. He lies, "Really. It was just a one time thing. It’s just – I just thought the weed would make me feel better."

Betty contemplates this. "Did it?"

Jughead laughs ruefully. "No. Nothing really does these days." It had made him feel better for a while earlier in the day, but that was more because he was absorbed in Jason’s presence and attention than anything else.

All of a sudden, Jughead feels a bit empty at the thought that the happiness that had filled him so brightly at the beginning of the day had, in reality, been so fleeting. It had never been like that when Archie was around. It’s not like Jughead’s life was all rainbows and sunshine before, but sometimes it feels like Archie took something from this world with him when he died and Jughead’s been left scrambling ever since, trying to find something to make it all better again. 

He takes an unsteady breath in and says to Betty, "You know, I think about Archie all the time. There’s not a moment where I’m not." It’s the truth, a statement so honest it’s like he can’t help from saying it, like something otherworldly is pulling it out of him, and he needs her to know, he _needs _her to. "I know I don’t talk about him all the time, but he’s always, always there."

He doesn’t realize he’s shaking until Betty reaches around his middle to hug and steady him. "It's alright, Juggie." The words calm him down immensely and he curls even further into Betty's grasp. "I'm sorry I tried to tell you that you were replacing him with Veronica, I just -"

"It's fine, Betty, it really is," he says. He's so tired he doesn't think he could even attempt to have this conversation, and it's not like she wasn't a little bit right. He wraps his arms around her shoulders and says, "I don't tell you this enough, but I'm glad I have you around."

She laughs softly into his ear. "Do you ever think about how the most important moment in our lives was when Archie tried to stick his booger on the wall all those years ago in preschool and I threatened to tell the teacher until he bribed me with your guys' friendship?" Betty smiles, beautiful and bright, and for a moment he looks exactly like the girl of last year, who she used to be before all this happened. "If he'd had no boogers that day, maybe we wouldn't be here."

Jughead sighs wistfully. "A booger of true destiny." He laughs too, a moment later, and both of them descend into a fit of giggles.

After they've caught their breath, Betty rests her cheek against Jughead's shoulder and says, "I'm glad I have you around, too." 

"Fuck, marry, or kill: Dobby, Dumbledore, or Hagrid."

"What kind of question is that?" Betty asks, dropping the book she was reading for English down from her face so that they can see her wide, horrified eyes.

Veronica shrugs, not even bothering to pay attention to the homework in front of her. She plays with her pencil and gazes at Betty instead. "Answer it, B. You have to."

Jughead chimes in with, "I would kill Dobby without hesitation."

Betty swings her paperback so it hits Jughead on the arm. "That’s heartless."

"Is it?" He asks.

The three of them sit in a circle on the floor of Veronica’s room, various lined paper and textbooks spread out in front of them as they attempt to do work. They haven’t gotten anything done, but none of them really mind; it’s the first time they’ve all hung out since their debacles, and it’s the first hang out where Betty hasn’t tried to punish Veronica for existing, where Veronica hasn’t retaliated with some nasty comment, where Jughead hasn’t sat there and kept quiet only to confront them both about it later. Instead, Veronica’s been coming up with options for “Fuck, Marry, Kill” that have gotten increasingly worse as time goes on. Betty’s even been laughing at them with her.

"Well, I would never kill Hagrid, so I guess marry him. Which means I have to have sex with Dumbledore, but he’s gay so –"

"Oh, so you’re a Dumbledore apologist?" Veronica asks, a shit-eating grin on her face. "I bet you defend Snape for bullying kids, too, huh? Under the guise of _love_ or whatever that shit argument is."

This might be the moment where, before, Betty would have scowled at Veronica and taken the conversation too seriously, but now she just rolls her eyes and tries to go back to her reading. "No comment."

Veronica smiles at her happily, even though Betty can’t see it anymore. Probably _because_ she can’t. When Veronica realizes Jughead’s caught her in the act though, she has the decency to at least blush a little. She throws her pencil at him in jest and he dodges it expertly.

"Betts," Jughead says, causing her to peer over the top of her book back at him, "Did you ever get to talk to Polly?"

Betty sighs. "No. I don’t think they really intended on letting me speak to her, I think it was just a lie to tide me over for a while." She dog ears the page she’s on, closes her paperback, and bites her lip. "I think Jason tried to visit her."

Jughead blinks in surprise. "What?" 

"I heard Mom and Dad talking about it in the kitchen last night. I guess they got a call from the hospital she’s in, alerting them that some boy tried to come and see her. He didn’t give his name, but the description fits Jason perfectly. And I mean, who else would it be, anyway?"

Veronica frowns. "Aren’t they broken up?"

Betty scowls. "Yeah, but he’s like that – he’ll pull Polly back in at the last minute and convince her that he loves her again. He’s a big manipulator."

Jughead blurts out, "How do you know that, though?"

Betty looks at him oddly. She says, already a little defensive, "What do you mean? I saw the way he treated my sister –"

"Did you actually _see _ it or just hear about it from your mom?"

"Jughead –"

"I just – why would he try to go back to her now, when they haven’t seen each other in months? What would he get out of manipulating her now, while she’s locked away from the world?" Jughead shrugs, desperate to play off his sudden defense of Jason Blossom as casual.

Betty rolls her eyes. "Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot that you had one conversation with Jason and now you know everything about him."

Veronica’s expression becomes puzzled. She turns to look at Jughead. "You mean at Pop's -"

He scrambles to cut Veronica off. "The homecoming after party at Thornhill," he interjects quickly. At the mention of that night, the two girls suddenly look away from one another. "It just doesn’t add up, that’s all," he says, clearing his throat sheepishly and turning back to Betty.

"Jughead, it was definitely him. The nurses even identified that stupid car of his. I don’t know what you want me to say."

Betty goes back to reading silently, obviously annoyed at him, and after a moment of peering at Jughead carefully, Veronica continues her work too. Jughead just stares at the blue lines of his paper, his pencil scribbling back and forth, making shallow valleys of lead in the sea of white.

Betty gets picked up just an hour later for dinner by Alice, but Jughead stays longer and Veronica lets him, knowing he doesn’t really have anyone or anything to get back to. Veronica herself doesn’t seem to, either. Jughead had met her mom when Hermione Lodge was working at Pop’s, of course, but he’d never had much of a conversation with her beyond, _ Pickles on the side would be cool, thanks. _

The only person who is ever around the Pembrooke is the Lodge’s butler, Smithers, an old, bumbling man who keeps the house respectable and drives Veronica wherever she needs to go. Jughead likes him quite a bit, if only because he seems like he’s just popped out of a classic novel, straight from the words on the page with his proper British accent and his pocket watch and everything.

When Smithers sticks his head into the bedroom and offers to make them dinner that night, Veronica waves him off easily, saying something along the lines of, _Don't worry, we'll find something later, _and Betty's words from a couple days ago spin around Jughead's brain in alarm. He studies her for a moment as though looking at her enough will reveal all of her deep, dark secrets to him. An awful type of nausea dips low in his stomach.

"Are you not hungry?" Jughead asks after a moment.

"Not particularly," Veronica replies, distracted by whatever section she's reading out of her textbook. 

Jughead stares down at his notes, which are, to be honest, made up of mostly gibberish he knows won't really help him later, and he thinks about what to do. "What's your favorite food?" He asks suddenly, looking up at her.

Veronica sighs and falls backward, her back hitting the mattress. She closes her eyes, and for a minute, Jughead almost thinks she's not going to answer him and is instead just going to lay like that for the next hour, but she speaks into the air, "Pancakes."

"Would you eat pancakes if I made them for us?"

Veronica frowns. "Jug, I'm really not that hungry -"

"Ronnie," he says softly but seriously, and the change in tone makes her open her eyes and look toward him. "C'mon. I can even put toppings in them - very fancy, I know." She doesn't reply, still in her position on the bed, her eyes closed again. "Whaddya say?" He asks.

It takes a second, but eventually she says, "Okay."

Thankfully the Lodges aren't so upscale that they don't have a box of instant pancake mix shoved into the top shelf of their pantry or else Jughead's plan would be ruined. He busies himself making a vat of batter, and Veronica hangs around watching over the process mostly silently until she decides he's done something wrong and bosses him around. He makes blueberry, chocolate chip, banana, and strawberry pancakes, and when Veronica eyes the steaming stack of them all on the plate next to the counter top and comments that he's made a lot, Jughead shrugs and says, "Better too much than not enough, eh? It'll leave you leftovers to eat later." Veronica gives a noncommittal hum and watches the way the bubbles pop at the surface of the pancakes currently cooking.

Smithers has retired to his own quarters, so there's no one to yell at them when they sit on the cold tile floor of the kitchen and tear and rip at the giant stack with their hands. They cheers their first pancakes with each other, but by the time Jughead is finishing his second, Veronica's still only halfway through her first. Jughead tries to swallow down his worry and think about how it's good that she's eating something at all.

He's just about to start his third when Veronica says, "Let's play two truths and a lie," seemingly out of nowhere, a bit of pancake in her hand. "You know what that is, right?"

Jughead nods. "Yeah, but you have to go first," he says through a mouthful of food.

"Okay," she says and bites off another small piece, thinking as she chews. She holds up her hand and sticks a finger up, indicating _one._ "I like Betty so much that I overthink everything I say to her because I'm so afraid that she hates me, even when that thing I'm saying to her is about having sex with Dumbledore from _Harry Potter_," she holds up another finger, "When I was thirteen I used to sneak my friends into my Dad's office and we'd drink his brandy, and once I drank enough of it to vomit all over his white carpet, staining it blue from a slushie I'd drank earlier in the day," Jughead laughs at the image and Veronica smiles slightly before she says, "Or... this is the most food I've eaten in the last three days, but last week I ate two burgers from Pop's with a side of fries and onion rings, a pint of ice cream, and, like, a whole thing of cookie dough in the span of maybe three hours." She looks away and tries to laugh like it's funny, but Jughead can tell that she doesn't think it is, not really.

Jughead watches Veronica stare at her hands. "The vomit."

"Yeah," Veronica nods, mustering up a rueful, half smile at him, "It stained the carpet red, not blue." Jughead is about to say something about how he really doesn't think that fits into the rules of the game, but then she's idly playing with one of the rings on her finger and saying, "Your turn."

He thinks for a while, chin in his hands, the last part of a pancake going cold in his other hand, and finally he says, "Yesterday I almost burned the concessions stand at the Twilight Drive-In down because I tried to use the popcorn machine to make popcorn for myself, but definitely did it all wrong..." Veronica lets out a snort of laughter as Jughead scrambles to think of anything else, "...I haven't seen my dad in so long that sometimes I lay awake at night and wonder if he's dead, too," and then Jughead swallows and looks at the polished kitchen floor as he finishes, "And I kissed Jason Blossom. More than once."

Veronica stares at him, her own problems forgotten. "Jason Blossom?" She says in disbelief, and Jughead can't tell if she's marking that as her answer or if she's just questioning the boy's overall existence.

"That one's true," Jughead gives a guilty smile. He thinks back to the three things he said and then laughs cautiously, the nervousness of spilling his guts to Veronica still spinning around his head. "Shit - I think I forgot to put a lie in there."

Veronica laughs along with him. "I don't think either of us know how to play this game right."

Jughead shrugs. "There are worse things to be bad at, I guess," he takes a bite out of the last of the pancake in his hand and gestures toward her and then the high stack of food they still have left, "Eat another one."

Veronica flattens her lips together, but she does grab one more and take a bite into it. "Jason Blossom? Really? No wonder he bought you a burger at Pop's that day."

This shocks a laugh out of Jughead, but it tapers off easily. "It all happened a little while after that, actually. It's a long story," his fingers trace shapes on the cold, expensive tile floor. "Betty would kill me."

"Yeah," Veronica laughs, "Yeah, she would. Jeez, Juggie. You really know how to pick 'em, huh?"

She doesn't ask for him to explain, and he doesn't realize how relieved he is until no other words come out of her mouth about it. He's glad that she just takes it at face value and shakes her head at him, a little bit fond and still a little bit in disbelief, and then she stands up to go get them both water.

They tear and bite off a few more pieces of pancake in companionable silence, the weight of both of their words hanging above them like a heavy blanket full of reality, and Jughead leaves soon after, even though a part of him doesn't want to. The child inside of his chest wants to ask if he can stay and live here forever, just him and Veronica running around this empty suite, eating pancakes on the floor for dinner, the two of them confessing their quiet sins to each other for months until they start to feel clean again, with Betty and Smithers occasionally around somewhere in the background.

But he's got a cold projection booth waiting for him to come warm it up, and so he packs up all of his things up and heads home.

He's halfway out the door when he turns around and says, "You'll eat the rest for leftovers, right?" He shoots Veronica a pointed look.

Veronica laughs, "_Yes, _Jughead." But she's got _that_ pearly white smile on, the one that he's sure she's pulled out a million times on her parents and authority figures to convince them everything's okay before she goes behind their back and does whatever she wants.

"No, Veronica, I'm serious -"

"I know. You don't have to baby me, I can take care of myself -"

"Obviously not." He says suddenly, stepping back toward her for a moment, and the abrupt tone of his voice shocks both of them. "I just mean, like - I worry about you, Betty worries about you, and obviously it's for good reason, okay? Listen, I'm not going to check you into a - a mental hospital or something. You don't have to pretend everything is fine just so I don't go and tell anyone."

Who would he tell, anyway? The only responsible adult he knows is Fred, and Fred barely knows anything about Veronica beyond the fact that she's Hermione's daughter. He's not sure how Smithers would handle any of it, and it's not like Veronica's parents are around. He doesn't even know if Veronica's mother would care at all if she was told. Jughead knows what it's like to have no one really looking out for you, knows what it's like to have people assume that the parents you have take care of you in the right ways when they don't.

Veronica's stopped looking at him and instead she fidgets uncomfortably, twirling and twirling her ring around her finger until he's sure it's leaving a bright red stripe of skin under the metal.

Jughead sighs and reaches out to take her hand in his. He squeezes it tightly until she looks up at him again, and then he sees the way her eyes have gone glassy. He tells her, "But you have to promise me that you'll be as honest about everything with me as you can, and that you'll try, and that you'll talk to me when it gets hard. And Betty, too. I promise she'll want to hear it." He squeezes her hand again. "We want to be _there _for you, that's what friends do, you know?"

Veronica laughs and it comes out throaty and a little bit watery. "Right, and friends make friends extremely giant proportions of pancakes just because they said it was their favorite food."

"Hey, I put in a lot of hard work, so you better appreciate them," he squeezes her hand one more time, "Although, large stacks of pancakes aren't really a substitute for therapy, so..."

"Jughead, I -" and then she just shakes her head, rubs at her face with the hand that's not in his, and exhales a shuddering breath.

"We'll figure it out."

"I'm not sure if it's all that simple." Veronica admits to him, her face tinged red at the corners. She smiles at him sadly and confesses, "Don't you ever have that feeling sometimes, where you're not really sure that you want to get better?"

She looks down at their intertwined hands, the way her nails, dark and deep and long, stand out against the lines etched in his pale palm.

Jughead swallows, doesn't reply to her question, and just says, "We'll figure something out, okay?"

Veronica's lip trembles, almost like she might start crying again, but instead she just pulls him into a hug. "Okay," she says softly into his shoulder, and the way she says it makes Jughead feels like maybe he's finally done something right.

In his dream, the three of them are inside the hallway closet at Thornhill. The closet is too big inside in the way that rooms tend to be in dreams, but Jughead notices this passively and then moves on, too busy with the sight of Betty and Veronica in front of him.

Veronica has bruises all up and down her legs – blue and black and sallow, sickly yellow – but there are also bruises on her neck that are plum purple and red at the edges, like the ones Jughead often has. Betty’s smoothing Veronica’s hair down, smoothing the fabric of her dress around her waist down, fussing and fussing over her.

Veronica says to Betty, _ Kiss me again, _her voice entranced by something otherworldly, and Betty just rolls her eyes and fusses, her fingers getting tangled up in the pearls at Veronica’s neck.

They don’t seem to notice they’re being watched by Jughead, don’t seem to understand that he’s there at all. The closet feels dusty like a room from a dollhouse that hasn’t been touched in years, but there’s an orange hum of light all around that he can’t find the source to. It paints all of them warmly, casting fuzzy shadows on their faces.

Suddenly the situation changes and Archie’s towering in front of Jughead with Jughead’s fingers on his neck. They’re standing in the places where Betty and Veronica had just been, and Jughead’s looking up at Archie from under his eyelashes, the pads of his fingertips falling into the hollows of Archie’s neck and collarbone, brushing skin that feels so hot it almost burns. Archie’s looking down at him with lidded eyes, his gaze gently trained on Jughead’s face and his mouth is parted a little, like he’s about to say something. Jughead waits and waits, his fingers grasping the crisp white collar of Archie’s dress shirt, his nails getting caught on the cotton. He so desperately wants Archie to speak, to utter something.

Archie leans down just a little, as though it’s a jolt of movement from being shocked or pushed, and Jughead thinks, _ Yes, _his hands twisting in the material of Archie’s shirt, but then there’s someone banging on the closet door from the other side and they won’t stop and they won’t stop and they won’t stop and Jughead wants –

_Jughead!_

He wakes up with a jolt, sitting up on his cot, his chest heaving in and out dangerously, unable to catch his breath. Someone’s pounding on the door of the projection booth, and Jughead can see the slight bulge every time their fist makes contact with the metal.

He stumbles out of bed, goose bumps forming on his skin immediately from the cold air, and walks toward the door. The person keeps banging loudly even as he undoes the lock and tugs the door open. 

A rush of even colder air hits Jughead and his whole body tenses up. When he blinks his eyes open, he’s met face-to-face with Jason, hair wet and teeth chattering, looking especially pale in the moonlight. It’s raining and freezing cold outside, so he pulls Jason in by the soaked material of his shirt without a thought and shuts the door firmly behind him.

Jason drips water onto the middle of the floor, and Jughead bumbles around the edges of his room, eventually finding and throwing a stiff towel at him to dry off with. Jason stands there, shivering, pathetically trying to dry himself off with the barest of movements, so pathetic that Jughead eventually helps him out and pats his face and hair dry. When he tries to take off the jacket and shirt that have molded themselves wetly to Jason’s torso, Jason shakes his head.

"No, it’s fine." 

"You’ll catch a cold -"

"I have to leave soon, I shouldn’t even be here anyway, I –" 

But Jughead just tugs the clothes off anyway and hangs them up in any place he can find to dry. Jughead turns on his space heater and gives Jason the last pair of clean pajamas he currently has, and Jason lets him, shivering uncontrollably the entire time until Jughead has wrapped him in a blanket and sat him at his desk chair in front of the heater.

They sit across the room from each other, the sounds of heavy rain whipping against the outside of the little building and the ambient hum of the heater taking up the space in between their silence. Jason says nothing, and Jughead says nothing, still feeling a little bit sleepy, like he might have never really woken up.

He leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes. Maybe only minutes pass, maybe it’s a half an hour, but Jughead only opens his eyes again when Jason’s quietly croaking out his name.

Jason looks sickly, sitting there in the chair, like maybe he could have a fever or he’s about to throw up, but he’s holding a white square of something in his hands. It takes a moment for Jughead to realize what it is: the polaroid of himself that Archie had on him the day he died, the photo that Jason returned to Jughead just after the funeral.

Jason thumbs the edges of the polaroid. There’s a small trace of a smile on his lips, but it looks all wrong. "It’s a good photo," Jason remarks quietly, but all of a sudden Jughead wants to rip it out of is hands and take it back, say, _ Maybe this has gone too far. _

"What do you want?" Jughead asks, feeling soberly awake. "Why did you come here?" He's only just realized that it’s the middle of the night and this shouldn’t _ really _ be happening, that Jason’s not _ really _supposed to be here.

Jason puts the polaroid back down where he found it in the mess of Jughead’s desk, but he doesn’t look up at Jughead. He just stares down at the Jughead in the photo, the Jughead that doesn’t really have a face.

"I’m - I gotta go. I’m leaving town."

All of the breath leaves Jughead’s lungs in a rush. "What?" He asks, his words barely audible.

"I’m leaving town," Jason repeats, and it’s only then does Jughead realize that Jason's hands are shaking and it's not from the cold, "And we’ve got to talk about some stuff." He still won’t look at Jughead, but Jughead can tell from the sound of his voice that something’s really, really wrong.

"Jason." Jughead swallows down the nausea in his stomach. "What do you mean you’re leaving? Is everything okay?" For a moment, he thinks Jason is going to ask him to come along. He thinks back to their conversation in the car vaguely, tries not to think about it too hard to keep the thoughts of _ Archie, Archie, Archie, _out of his brain, but he remembers the way Jason had looked out at the green in front of them with such dull, impossible want.

But now he can’t even look Jughead in the eyes and banging on a person’s door in the middle of the night, in the pouring rain, just to sit blankly in their house and say nothing isn’t the type of beginning that leads to a run away story.

Jughead then thinks of the drugs, the money stacked away in Jason’s car, the Ghoulie they met with in the middle of nowhere, Polly, and he stills.

"Are you –" and Jughead hates to admit it, but there’s an audible tremble in his voice when he says, "Are you going to go meet her?"

Jason’s eyes flick up to look at him then. They’re glassy and bloodshot, and his nose is warm and red, how noses get when someone’s going to cry. He looks like he’s about to have a nervous breakdown.

"Jughead, there’s more to it than you know. You have to understand –"

"Betty said you went to go see her. Polly. At wherever the fuck they’re keeping her. But I didn’t believe it. I told her she was wrong." Jughead’s hand tightens in the thick blankets of his cot. There's a soft collapse happening in his chest and he thinks, _I will not cry in front of Jason Blossom, I will not._ "I told her she was wrong."

"You have to listen to me," Jason says, looking at Jughead desperately, "You have to listen, okay? Just listen."

Jughead doesn’t want to. He wants to throw this boy back out into the cold, spit in his face. He wants to go back to sleep and dream of better things, of better places than here, of better boys than the one sitting in front of him. But Jason’s got this look on his face like he’ll die if Jughead doesn’t say yes, and Jughead, more than anyone, cracks so easy in the presence of Jason Blossom.

So he says, "Okay," and then Jason takes a shuddering breath in and he says –

Imagine this: your sister’s gloved hand on the hood of your bright red car, the last time you’ll see either of these things for a long, long time, you think. She’s asking you if you’re scared and you’re saying no, but you are, of course you are. 

You’d be scared either way.

The life you would have if you stayed here is devastatingly awful – “suffocating” is the word that comes to mind when you think about it all – and the life you’re about to have when you get across Sweetwater is unsure and full of half-baked promises to a girl you don’t really love anymore. But it’s the right thing to do, and you know it. It's not just about you anymore, there's _children _to think about now, _your _children, and you've been raised poorly enough by your own parents to know that your kids deserve better than an absent father. So you know you have to go.

You move to get the boat ready while Cheryl gets your backpack from the car, but as you step toward the edge of the river, you hear distant voices. It’s six in the morning, just after daybreak, and there’s absolutely no reason anyone should be here beside you and your sister.

The voices carry easily through the gaps in the trees and you can’t make out the words but you can tell from the tone that whoever it is, they're fighting. It takes a moment to figure out whether it’s two or three people, but there’s a boyish one who’s voice almost cracks every time he raises it and much sharper, much more feminine hum. 

You move toward them quietly through the brush. All you can think about is how bad this is. If people see you and Cheryl, it ruins the whole plan spectacularly. 

When their silhouettes first come into view, you can’t really make anything out, so you keep drawing closer. If you weren't sure enough about it before, now you would know they’re _ definitely _fighting, though you can’t really figure out what it’s about in between concentrating on making sure they don’t see you and trying to place who they are.

You move behind a large pine tree, tall and thick, and peak out from the trunk to see a clearing close to the bed of the river. There’s a blanket and a few bags left open and unattended. The couple is down by the river’s edge, a tall boy with his back to the water towering over a smaller woman.

You see them from a twisted angle, but the moment you lay your eyes on them, you know exactly who both of them are.

And then, as though a reactionary instinct, the woman snaps and shoves the boy back, causing him to stumble and trip over an exposed root in the dry bed, and you watch as he falls into the river.

You’re yelling, _ What the fuck, _ Grundy is looking at you with wide eyes as you stumble toward the river, she’s crying as you remove your shoes, saying, _ I didn’t mean to, Jason – it was an accident – Jason, I didn’t mean to – _but her words fall away as you plunge into the rushing water.

It's a stupid idea. It takes too long to find Archie, but eventually you do. His body is a little downstream, unnaturally bent on the side of a rock that’s half submerged in the water. It takes so much effort to drag him back to shore, to battle the current, that you think you might slip under halfway through, but you don’t.

You bring him to shore close to the spot where he fell in. Grundy’s gone, absolutely no trace of her except one of the bags you’d seen now is gone. Cheryl’s there, though, still looking angelic in her white dress. She rushes over to help you without question and the two of you drag Archie Andrews’ body back to even terrain.

You bend over him, checking his pulse. Nothing. You pinch his nose and breath into his mouth. Nothing. Cheryl’s sobbing uncontrollably beside you, her mascara running down her face in black streaks, and you’re pushing on his chest cavity, hoping and hoping. Nothing.

Dilton Doiley finds you in five minutes, making his boy scout troop wait a couple dozen feet back from the situation. While he’s on the phone with 911 and Cheryl’s shaking, crouched next to Archie’s body, you move to look at the area by the blanket.

It’s an old picnic blanket, thick and easy to lay on. There’s a backpack leaning against the log beside it, and even if you hadn’t known that it was Archie’s, you’d know it was a kid’s. It’s so juvenile in design and worn to the bone. If he’d lived another year, you reckon Fred would have bought him a new one.

A few things spill out from the open compartment of it: a water bottle, dented and scratched, the sleeve of a jacket, a wallet. And then peeking out of the wallet is a little white square. You tug it out to look at it and see the shadow of a boy staring up at you.

The bottom strip reads “JUG” in Archie’s goofy, scratchy handwriting.

Grundy calls you a few minutes later, when Sheriff Keller’s cop car has just arrived and you can see him and a couple of his buddies walking toward you.

_ You can’t tell anyone, you can’t tell anyone, you can’t tell anyone. I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to. _

The end of each phrase is punctured with a deep and guttural, wracking sob. You can see the Sheriff getting closer now, his eyes searching around the scene.

_ Jason, _ she sobs, _ Jason, You can’t tell anyone. _

Unfortunately, you know Grundy better than most – not as well as Archie had known her, it seems – but she did tutor you for a semester and she was always kind to you. You stopped it before it all got ahead of itself because you realized where she was trying to go with it, and you really had been in love with Polly back then. It was also the wrong type of relationship to have as a teenager, you knew, but that wasn’t as big of a factor in the situation as it should have been for you. Maybe that had been the crux of Archie’s problem, too.

So when you hear her crying, you don’t really care. Maybe she hadn’t meant to push him that far – truthfully, it didn’t look like she had – but she still did and Archie was still dead which meant she was still guilty. 

But then, over the phone, you hear her voice say with startling clarity, _ I’ll kill you. _

Your breath hitches. You blink.

_ If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you too. _ She’s not crying anymore, barely more than a sniffle, and her breathing is ragged in your ear. _ I’m serious, Jason, I’ll kill you. I have a gun in the glove box of my car. I’ll - I'll do it. There are things I’ve done that you don’t know about, and I’ll do this. I’ll find you at your house tonight and I’ll blow your fucking brains out. _

In the corner of your eye, Archie’s body lays limp and splayed out on the grass. Both Dilton and Cheryl stand at least ten feet away from his corpse, like something might happen if they get too close. You watch his body and find it so unnatural to see the way his chest stays static without the intake of any breath.

_ I’ll kill you. _

Sheriff Keller asks you what you saw and you say, _I saw h__is body in the river. I saw him being pushed by the current and I jumped in to try and save him. I didn’t see anything else before that. _

Jughead doesn’t remember much about that last time he saw Jason. 

His brain had gone blank somewhere in the middle of the story, somewhere in between Archie and Geraldine Grundy alone, in the woods together, and the image Jason had painted of Archie's dead body smashed against the rock in the river. He had sat there blankly as Jason's finished the story, that familiar numbness that comes with his grief paralyzing Jughead's spinal cord and travelling all the way back up to his brain, attacking all of the synapses there.

He remembers distant images of Jason standing up in a flurry and leaving right after he finished speaking, taking the pile of his still damp clothes and slamming the door behind him as he left, just as loud as he’d been when he arrived. Saying nothing as goodbye, not even sparing Jughead another look, just shivering and shivering as he left.

Jughead knows he called Betty after that and, when she came over, they both cried together, shaking like children under the covers of Jughead’s bed.

And then they’d gone to the police the next morning, waited at the door in the misty morning cold as Sheriff Keller sauntered up easily to unlock the precinct, a donut in one hand and keys in the other.

And he hadn’t believed them about any of it, not one fucking bit.

Betty’s parents won’t run anything on it in the Register, either. 

Jughead and Betty draft up a document of what they know, Jughead having tried his best to put down what Jason had told him word-for-word, and they print it out and hand it over to Alice.

Alice reads it over, her eyes squinting through the lenses of her prescription glasses. She’s halfway into the third or fourth sentence when she looks up at them, puts the paper down, and says, "I’m sorry, but what in the absolute hell is this?"

"It’s information on who killed Archie," Jughead says, his hands twitching by his sides. He’s stopped feeling like a real person and more like a hollowed out sculpture of a boy. He can’t remember the last time he ate or if he and Betty slept in between their tears last night.

"You’re telling me that a high school music teacher drowned Archie in Sweetwater River? A woman more than half his age? Who he had an 'alleged' relationship with?" She sighs and takes her glasses off, tossing them onto her desk. "You both know that doesn’t sound like Archie at all."

"Mom," Betty spits out, "Mom, Archie died because of her."

"Betty," Alice says in a soft and airy voice, "I know you miss him and I know it hurts, but we can’t just go around printing accusations about people that we don’t know are true."

"It is true," Jughead argues, "Jason Blossom saw them that day at the river."

Alice raises an eyebrow. "Jason Blossom? You expect me to trust Jason _Blossom,_ of all people, as my source?"

For a moment, Jughead almost says, _ He wouldn’t lie to me, _but Jason had and that’s the reason they’re here only just now trying to enact justice against Archie’s death. Jason had lied to him and led him on and kept so many secrets the whole time that, for a moment, Jughead looks down at Alice and wonders if she's right. Wonders if he should even trust Jason with this story. It makes Jughead feel so insane that he has to halt all of his thoughts and talk himself down. Jason was there at the river, he knows that. Jason had brought him the polaroid, he knows that. It's not a lie. It can't be.

Betty clenches her jaw, looking down at her mother. "Mom, Jason and Polly ran off together." When Alice only stares blankly at her daughter, Betty pulls out her cell phone, shoves it into Alice's face, and continues desperately, "Call Polly and see if she’s still in that hospital you and Dad keep her locked up in. Call and see if she’s still there!"

Alice rolls her eyes, pushing Betty's hand away from her like it's nothing. "Elizabeth, the Sisters would inform me if something had happened with Polly. Their facilities are highly secure, anyway. There’s no way your sister could stage a break out, even if she wanted to."

"Mom," Betty chokes out, tears visible in her eyes.

Alice leans forward and takes a hand from each of them in both of hers. Betty’s scars point toward the sky and Alice’s fingers are so cold around Jughead's palm. "Both of you need to go home and get some sleep. I think maybe the weather has gotten to the two of you and made you feverish and delusional. When you wake up tomorrow, you’ll feel better. Everything will feel normal again, okay? You just need a little rest."

_The_ _ Blue and Gold _is a student run newspaper that nobody reads at a small town high school. They shouldn’t run the article. Jughead shouldn’t have even written it in the first place, really, but Betty tells him it’s their only way to get the story out and he knows she’s right. 

Veronica lets them hole up in her apartment to write it. They take the jumbling mess that is the document Jughead wrote to show Alice and somehow, Betty helps him turn it into something that they can actually get away with publishing, something that's more than a half-explained story a sleep deprived boy wrote while shaking.

The next issue is set to publish on Monday, so Betty spends the rest of the weekend sorting out the other articles for the issue even though they don’t really matter in light of what they’re actually trying to do. Archie’s story is the front piece, the cover article, but Betty still has to make up something for the other couple pages. She writes a blurb for page three about the new food they're bringing to the cafeteria, and Jughead watches her almost poke herself in the eye with frustration while doing it.

"Broccoli? Who the fuck cares about broccoli?" She keeps muttering to herself, upset as she reads the piece over and over, looking for mistakes. "A pedophile is on the loose and I'm writing about fucking broccoli."

The three of them barely go outside the whole weekend. Smithers makes them meals, meals that the two of them watch Veronica eat out of the corner of their eyes cautiously, just to make sure she has a fair portion of each, and Betty sits bent over her laptop for hours on end. Sometimes Veronica wraps her arms around the middle of Betty’s torso, her own body curling with the bend of Betty’s spine, and Betty lets her. She cards her fingers through the ends of Betty’s hair every once in a while, and it’s such a gentle act of love and support that Jughead has to look away from it.

Veronica takes care of him, too. She makes sure he showers and drinks enough water, and whenever he starts thinking about everything that’s happened and the truth of it all seeps in through the layer of shock, she finds a big blanket to wrap around him and shushes him to sleep with the softest of noises, holding his hand and swiping her thumb along the back of it.

It’s the worst weekend of Jughead’s life and it will be for as long as he lives. Nothing else ever comes close to the sheer magnitude of sorrow from the chain of events Jason sets off by leaving, the pure hell of finally _ knowing _and not being sure if what they’re retroactively trying to do with that knowledge is even going to work.

But later, as Jughead grows up and grows older, as he and Veronica and Betty get together for the anniversary of Archie’s death every year, he’ll look back at the weekend and realize that it was the start of a closure he thought he was never going to get, and he’ll be eternally grateful.

Betty has a finger on the “send” button, her cursor hovering over it nervously. She’s done this every month for the past year and a half, clicking this button to send her PDF off to the printing house so that physical newspapers will show up to Riverdale High in the morning, but it’s never carried this much weight before.

"Are you sure we’re allowed to do this?" Jughead asks one more time, eyeing the email.

The three of them are huddled around the computer screen, staring at it with big eyes like they’ve been doing all weekend. Jughead’s sure that he's damaged his vision somehow in these past few days by staring at this box of pixels for far too long.

Betty shrugs. She bites her bottom lip and looks anxiously at the screen. Veronica has a head on her shoulder and a comforting hand on her waist. "That’s freedom of the press for you," Betty remarks, "and also the fact that nobody else works on the fucking paper with me, so I get to do whatever the hell I want."

They all pause and look at each other for a second. It’s the lack of sleep and the isolation of being in the Pembrooke for seventy-two hours straight that makes all three of them burst out laughing at Betty’s words, giggles that quickly turn delirious and crazy and make it hard for them to catch their breath.

Betty clicks “send” easily after that, her shoulders still shaking with the leftover laughter as Jughead and Veronica snicker into the air, all three of them absolutely out of it. None of it seems very real, and the weight of what they've just accomplished won't particularly settle in until later.

As he and Betty brush their teeth at the Jack and Jill sinks of Veronica’s fancy bathroom, they stand in silence, both deathly tired and dressed in the overtly fancy silk pajamas Veronica found for them to wear to bed.

Jughead’s not thinking about anything, his mind numb and blank, when Betty bends down to spit her toothpaste out, stands up straight, and catches his eye in the mirror. "So…" She clears her throat and wipes away the excess foam around her mouth, "You and… Jason Blossom were friends, huh?"

He wants to laugh at the word “friends” but he’s not really sure why. He guesses they were friends, but also. Well. It was a bit more complicated than that, wasn’t it?

Jughead brushes his molars, back and forth, back and forth, carefully trying not to think about the way Jason's hands had felt when they cradled his face or what it felt like to kiss him. "It’s a long story."

"I think I’d like to hear it some time if you’ll tell me," Betty says to him quietly.

Jughead spits the toothpaste out of his mouth and cups water up to his lips. "Did your mom call Polly?"

"Don’t know. Haven’t talked to her since we saw her at the Register." Betty stares at her reflection in the mirror. "She’s probably pissed. She’ll be even more pissed when she sees _The __Blue and Gold."_

Jughead shrugs, putting his toothbrush in the holder next to Betty and Veronica’s and capping the toothpaste. "It’s not like she knows where you are. Just stay at Veronica’s forever and never go home."

Betty gives a barely there chuckle and a fond roll of her eyes. "Yeah, let’s ask Smithers to adopt both of us." Jughead grins at her in the mirror and Betty smiles back. Then she says, "Veronica’s been good. I mean – she is good. Veronica is good. It’s very cool of her to let us stay."

Jughead turns toward her and leans his weight back against the counter. "You know she likes you, right?" he says quietly, even though Veronica’s off having a shower in another bathroom all the way down the hall and there’s no way she would hear them.

Betty seems to contemplate this, staring out at nothing for a moment. "Yeah, I… I do know." She pauses, and then lifts her gaze up to look at him. "What would you say if I liked her back? Just like… what would you say?"

"I’d say, thank God Betty finally got her head out of her ass and stopped being mean to the girl she’s had a crush on for months."

Betty blushes absolutely red. "I haven’t had a crush on her for _months_… you know, I really didn’t like her when I first met her, it just – it just snuck up on me, that’s all."

"Yeah," Jughead tells her softly, "that’s how it seems to go, I’ve noticed."

It takes Jughead a long time to fall asleep that night, just as it’s taken him a long time for the past couple nights. He lays awake in the dim light of Veronica’s room, his limbs splayed out like a starfish all over the air mattress that Smithers set up for him on the floor. Even though he knows it’s deathly cold outside – winter having finally started to take a real hold on Riverdale for this year – he feels too hot under the covers and in the stale air of the bedroom.

He goes to get water from the kitchen, creaking through the empty apartment. He idly wonders where Veronica’s mom is, but he’s also glad she’s not here. Jughead doesn’t know if he could stand to try and explain to another adult everything that’s been going on only to have them call him crazy.

He walks back into the bedroom as quietly as he can from the kitchen, closing the door behind him softly as to not wake anyone. He tiptoes by Veronica’s big, lush bed and spares a look at the two girls asleep on it. He’s momentarily surprised by how close they’re laying, with one of Veronica’s arms around Betty’s waist and vice versa, the two of them facing each other in their sleep.

Jughead watches them on the bed for a moment, the way stark black hair intertwines with blonde curls, the way all of Veronica’s firm edges look next to Betty’s soft features, how peaceful they seem, holding onto each other, how right it seems, suddenly. Jughead hasn’t felt confident about much his whole life, especially not since Archie died, but looking at the way Veronica and Betty lay close to each other under the covers, he feels confident about them. As he’s settling back down into his bed and getting under the covers, he thinks about how, even if everything else went wrong, at least this one thing went right, at least this all lead to something happy.

At least someone got the love story they wanted.

It’s a bright and beautiful sunny day outside, and the light from the clear, blue sky leaks into the windows of Pop’s and colors everything in the daytime. Pop himself bustles around in the kitchen, easily filling orders, and the smell around them is one Jughead knows and cherishes, one of morning breakfast: eggs and pancakes and sausage links and bacon.

Archie’s got an omelette in front of him and a mostly discarded coffee cup, only halfway drunk. Jughead has two sunny side up eggs shining up at him that are begging to be cut into and a plethora of hash browns on the side he’s going to soak in the runny yolk. His cup of coffee is already almost gone – black, no sugar or creamer, of course – and he’s already starting to feel it take effect in his body. He buzzes a little, fidgeting up and down in the booth.

Pop breezes by their table, filling up Jughead’s mug with more coffee from the pot like he could read Jughead’s mind and dropping off the vanilla malt Archie ordered.

“A milkshake in the morning? Really, Archie?” Pop Tate chuckles fondly, ruffling Archie’s hair as he passes by to go seat the family of four that’s just walked in.

“I’m a growing boy!” Archie groans, not really to Pop, mostly for Jughead to hear.

Jughead laughs at him and Archie smiles, bright, bright, so bright, his freckles moving with the laugh lines of his skin.

He watches Archie pluck the red cherry from on top the bed of whipped cream and pull the fruit from its stem with his teeth. He flicks the stem away and laughs when it lands pathetically on top of the table, and Jughead thinks with the entire force of his body, _ I miss you, I miss you, Oh my God I miss you so much. _

Archie takes a sip from the straw of his milkshake and Jughead watches the liquid in the glass go disappear comically with every sip and swallow. Archie finishes with a lick of his lips after chugging almost half the glass down, and he sighs, content. He leans his elbow on the table and rests his face in the palm of his hand, looking across the table at Jughead with a thoughtful gaze.

“It’s just a dream, Jug.” He says, a sad smile on his face. “I’m not coming back.”

_ I know, _Jughead thinks, but somehow the words won’t come out. 

He reaches for the vanilla milkshake from the middle of the table instead and happily takes a sip from Archie’s straw, Archie laughing at him as he does so. It tastes ridiculously good, like he’d forgotten what a Pop’s milkshake tasted like. He tries to think of the last time he had one, but his memories fizzle out easily from the forefront of his mind. It’s alright; it doesn’t bother him too much at the moment.

“You wanna try some of my omelette?” Archie asks, cutting into his food.

Jughead shakes his head, and the two of them start at their dishes, Jughead watching his egg yolk spill out over the cheap, diner plate. He grins.

“What do you think’ll happen when you publish the article?” Archie asks through half a sausage in his mouth, the other half still firmly wedged on the fork he’s waving around as he talks. “Like, do you think people will believe you? I don’t know, the more I think about it, the more insane the whole story seems.” He smiles sheepishly across at Jughead again. “I guess I really did change from who I used to be, huh?”

Jughead blinks at him. Archie's face is a bit red from shame, and all Jughead wants to do is make it go away, make him happy again. “I think all the time about how much I’ve changed since you died,” Jughead blurts out. “And I think all the time about how I don’t know if you’d like me now.”

Archie pulls a funny face. “What? Jug, why would you say that? You know I would.”

“I don’t know, Arch.” He laughs nervously. “I don’t know. I don’t even think I like who I am anymore.”

Archie just frowns, the half eaten sausage still sadly sitting on his fork. “Stop that.”

“Did you hate me?” Jughead asks suddenly, leaning forward a little across the table, like the answer will be the bastion to his sanity, “The last time we talked? Over the phone?”

Archie laughs, but it sounds a bit sad. “No,” he says, shaking his head, “No, stupid, of course not.”

Jughead swallows and nods, unsure. “Okay." He agrees weakly.

“I wish we’d gone,” Archie says, cutting his omelette up into bits and bits and bits, “I wish we’d gone on the road trip. I wish I’d never called it off. I could have driven around and you could have written your Great American Novel in the passenger seat.”

“Yeah,” Jughead breathes out, a barely there smile gracing his lips, “Yeah. Me too, Arch.”

“But it’s okay,” Archie says, looking up at him, “You’ve got a lot of good things waiting for you.”

“How do you know that?” Jughead asks, and before Archie can open his mouth and respond, Jughead is shaking his head and saying, “Sometimes it feels like,” then he pauses to lick at his lips, “Sometimes it feels like the world outside Riverdale doesn’t exist, that you and I were the only people who created it."

Archie frowns. "Jug -"

"Sometimes it’s like I don’t know how I’ll keep living in the world without you. I don’t know anything good about the future if you’re not in it.”

Archie’s foot finds Jughead's under the table, and he nudges it slightly. “Think about all the good things that have happened since I’ve been gone.”

Jughead laughs, but it sounds more like a sob. “I don’t think there’s been any good things –”

“There has,” Archie interrupts, “You just don’t realize they’re good things yet. But you’ll get it eventually.”

Archie’s foot toes at his own again under the table. His heel swings and bumps Jughead’s ankle. They play footsie for a moment, just like they used to do when they were little and in this very same booth, each or maybe just one of their parents on either side of them.

Jughead’s feet catch one of Archie’s around his ankles and holds it there. “I won." He says, smiling weakly.

Archie rolls his eyes, but he lets his foot be kept in Jughead’s hold and eats more of his breakfast. “Whatever you say, Jughead. But just know I _let_ you win.”

Jughead grins. He leans over and takes another sip of the milkshake in the middle of the table, and it tastes like the sweetest thing he’s ever had. Archie's humming absently to whatever song is playing on the jukebox as he butters his toast, unaware that he's doing it at all. Jughead wishes he'd heard him sing any of those music sheets and ripped out journal pages full of lyrics that he found littering Archie's desk when he snuck into visit.

He watches Archie take a satisfying bite out of his piece of toast, and then steals it from Archie's hand to take a bite, too. “Can we stay here for a little while longer?” He asks Archie through a mouthful of food.

“Yeah,” Archie agrees easily, stealing the bread back, “Only if we share a stack of pancakes, though.”

Jughead grins. “‘Course.”

So Pop brings them a stack of four, two buttermilk for Archie and two chocolate chip for Jughead. Archie laughs warmly as Jughead pours a disgusting amount of syrup onto the plate, and they stay a little while longer.

**Author's Note:**

> _"your childhood dog is alive. your dead best friend wants to get coffee. you have been kind and good. there is nothing chasing you. you can sleep. what do you do?"_
> 
> my cancer ass: he was about to cry  
my cancer ass again, only five lines further down: ... and then he started to tear up, once again,
> 
> also i'm on tumblr @ [boosfic](https://boosfic.tumblr.com/) !


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